In this article, we are going to focus on the risk and treatments for rheumatoid arthritis. We will add numerical justifications to the statements we found on other sites like Mayo Clinic and WebMD.

Now that we have some basic understandings about how the MTC Diagnosis Miner works, we can head directly to the landing page of our topic. Just click this link. (Don’t worry if this is your first time here. You won’t miss much. Also, we will skip the Stats screen — if you wish to know more detail on this landing screen, please visit this example)

As Mayo Clinic states, factors that may increase your risk of rheumatoid arthritis include:

• Gender. Women are more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than men are.
• Age. Rheumatoid arthritis can occur at any age, but it most commonly begins between the ages of 40 and 60.
• Family history. If a member of your family has rheumatoid arthritis, you may have an increased risk of the disease.

We cannot verify the last statement, but we can see the first two statements numerically in the following screen (the “Prevalence” tab under the “Numbers” tab). In our data, there are 1% of the patients having rheumatoid arthritis for women of age 40-54, while on men, it is 0.6% prevalence for the same age band. For the age band of 55 and older, the prevalence turns higher to 1.5% and 1.2% for females and males, correspondingly.

Look out for the cost. It is slightly costly for adults on treating rheumatoid arthritis.

Checking on the hassles, the cost on time spent in visiting doctors, it also reflects that the adults are more costly.

Now click on the “Provider” tab. This is the place we can find experienced doctors on treating rheumatoid arthritis, within the area of your choice. Here we try to find some individual providers in the New York city area.

If you have read about this article in finding experienced doctor, where we used allergy as an example condition to search, you can immediately find that the specialists on rheumatoid arthritis are more focused (usually >30 Focus score) than specialists on allergy (usually <10 Focus score). The major indicative procedures for rheumatoid arthritis are abatacept injection and infliximab injection, among others, which are of course very different from the ones in the allergy case.

Feel free to browse around or submit your own search region. There is a rate limit of 5 minutes per query (in searching providers only, not other parts of the site).

We are finding the experienced providers based on their historical claims in the related treatments (medical procedures). You can find these procedures by clicking the “Treatment” tab on the navigator. Of course, to decide the experience of a provider, the contribution of each treatment is depending on how dedicate it is applied to rheumatoid arthritis. Therefore, the office visit kind of medical procedures won’t help much here. They are too general.

The procedures are represented by the CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) codes. Don’t worry, anytime you mouse over (or click, on mobile device) the CPT code, you can see popup detail about that CPT code.

The popular treatments include office visits, blood tests, even chemotherapy, which is another way to treat arthritis according to WebMD. This chemotherapy is expensive: costing 13 times more than the standard office visit (99213). In our sample data, a patient needs $1,341 annually to pay it ($103 + $1,238). And on average, he or she has to be treated more than 4 times in one year. The dollar amounts (charged, paid, covered) depend on regions, service providers, insurance plans and patients. The goal to show these numbers is to give relative comparison and bring in a rough idea about the cost. We do not mean to cover all variation on these factors.

Same under the “Treatments” screen, there are two tabs on medicine for rheumatoid arthritis. Before moving on, please be reminded that we are not endorsing or suggesting any medication. Check with a doctor if you need any suggestion on medication!

On “Popular Medications” tab, you will find a bar chart. Mouse over to see the prevalence of each drug. The numbers here reflect our sample data only.

A good reference in rheumatoid arthritis medication is provided by Mayo Clinic. According to its content, there are generally nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), steroids, disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARD), immunosuppressants and TNF-alpha inhibitors.

What popular in our sample are:

• Methotrexate (DMARD)
• Prednisone (steroid)
• Hydrocodone (pain killer for severe pain)
• Hydroxychloroquine (DMARD)
• Azithromycin (antibiotic, possibly treating side-effects from other drugs on immune system)
• Oxycodone (pain killer for severe pain)
• Amoxicillin (antibiotic)
• Enbrel (TNF-alpha inhibitor)
• Lisinopril (angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor used primarily in treating hypertension, congestive heart failure, and heart attacks) — according to Mayo Clinic, rheumatoid arthritis increases the risk of developing heart problems.

If you click on the “Medication Facts” tab, there are more popular medications listed, along with more details on them. The cost on Enbrel really stands out here.

Now head to the “Related” tab. We can find related medical conditions related to rheumatoid arthritis. If you compare the same screen for hypertension or diabetes, you will see these conditions listed here are not really highly related to rheumatoid arthritis. They are the highest related. But as rheumatoid arthritis is mostly related to age, gender and gene, it is not strongly linked to other conditions. Still, you may find highest linked conditions are the ones we mentioned in earlier sections, such as hypertension, pain and fatigue.

Clicking on the “Matched Conditions” tab will get you a list of conditions containing “rheumatoid arthritis”. These conditions compose the sample body we studied here.