Chronic arthritis. Prevalence, severity and distribution between primary care and referral centres in a defined rural...

By a simple self-administered hand test, hand handicap was revealed in 689 out of a population of 5262 individuals aged 40-70 years. Subsequent medical examination showed inflammatory hand disease in 119, 67 of whom had previously been in contact with the public health service at some level because of hand dysfunction. These 67 patients formed the material for our study, whose purpose was to analyse the distribution, treatment and follow-up of patients with inflammatory joint disease on different health care levels. In primary health care, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was found to be underreported. For half the cases the interval between onset of disease and assessment by a rheumatologist exceeded 5 years, and follow-ups were few and far between. In the referral centres, RA cases were dealt with more adequately. The prevalence of definite and probable RA was found to be 0.7 and 0.4%, respectively.