Type 2 diabetes mellitus risk assessment using FINDRISC in patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Objective: to investigate the prevalence of traditional risk factors (RFs) and to determine a 10-year risk for type 2 (T2) diabetes mellitus (DM), by using the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (FINDRISC) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Subjects and methods. The investigation enrolled 418 RA patients without a history of DM. The median age of the participants was 54 [41; 63] years; the median disease duration was 6 [2; 12] years. Most of the patients were positive for rheumatoid factor (75.6%) and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (77.3%) and had moderate and high RA activity (81.8%). Glucocorticoids (GCs), disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs, and biological agents were used in 42.1, 66.7, and 23.9% of the patients, respectively. FINDRISC was used to assess the risk of T2DM. A control group consisted of 100 gender- and age-matched individuals without inflammatory joint diseases or DM. Results and discussion. The most common modifiable traditional RFs in RA were abdominal obesity (AO) (63.6%), overweight (50.7%), and lack of physical activity (70.3%); the non-modifiable RF was age older than 45 years (69.1%). The RA and control groups showed the similar prevalence of RFs, except for AO that was more common in the absence of inflammatory joint diseases (75.0%) (p = 0.03). The number of RFs did not differ in RA patients (median RFs, 4 [2; 5]) and control individuals (4 [3; 5]) (p = 0.23). The moderate risk of developing T2DM in the ensuing ten years was 20.1 and 18.0% in RA patients and control individuals, respectively; the high risk was in 19.6 and 24.0% and the very high risk was in 2.7 and 2.0%, respectively (p > 0.05 in all cases). In RA, there was a weak correlation between the number of RFs and DAS28 (r = 0.10; p = 0.05), RFs and HAQ (r = 0.19; p 6.1 mmol/l) in 3.8% of the RA patients with a low/slightly increased risk for T2DM and in 16.1% of those with its moderate, high, and very high risks (p