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Rheumatoid Arthritis – Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment and More

Diagnosis for RA

When you visit your doctor with complaint on how you feel. Here are some of the things you can expect to happen at your appointment if the doctor thinks you have RA.

Personal and family medical history: Your doctor will need to know about your past and your relatives’. If someone in your family tree has RA, this increases your risk of having the disease.

Physical exam: The doctor examine different joint in your body for swelling, tenderness, and range of motion. These are symptoms of RA.

Antibody blood tests: Doctors look for certain proteins that show up in your blood when you have RA. These proteins mistakenly target healthy cells and kick off the inflammation process. So a high or positive test result means inflammation is in your body.

  • Rheumatoid factor (RF): high levels (over 20 u/ml)
  • Anti-CCP (anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide): high levels (over 20 u/ml)
  • ANA, or antinuclear antibodies: the results are positive or negative

Although not everyone with RA have these proteins.

Other blood tests: Other blood tests besides RF and anti-CCP can be done, they include:

Complete blood count: This will help your doctor confirm if you have anemia [3] (low red blood cells), which is a common symptom of RA.

Erythrocyte sedimentation rate: This measures how fast your red blood cells clump and fall to the bottom of a glass tube within an hour. Your doctor might call it a sed rate.

C-reactive protein: This test helps measure how much protein your liver makes if you have Inflammation. Results vary from person to person and lab to lab, but most of the time a normal result is less than 1.0.

Imaging tests: These can help your doctor know the severity of your disease and track it progress over time.

  • X-rays can show whether (and how much) joint damage you have, though damage may not show up early on.
  • Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound give a more detailed picture of your joints.

These scans aren’t normally used to diagnose RA, but they can help doctors find it early.