When you are young, it’s hard to imagine a day when opening a jar of peanut-butter or walking from the house to the car can result in excruciating pain. Rheumatoid arthritis, an inflammatory joint pain, can sneak up on us as we age, yet it can even affect children. While there’s no treatment, there are ways of managing the pain of arthritis and preventing further damage.

Signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis may include: joint pain, joint swelling and joints that are tender to the touch. Whether you have red puffy hands, firm bumps of tissue beneath the skin on your arms, or morning stiffness that lasts at least thirty minutes, you may have some level of the disease. Often, sufferers feel tired, lose weight and sense changes in wrists, hands, ankles and feet at first. In later stages, the elbows, shoulders, knees, hips and the jaw and neck can also be affected. Signs and symptoms of pain may flare up and then alternate with periods of relative remission.

There is no cure for rheumatoid arthritis, although treatments range from medications that relieve pain, surgery to prevent immobility, lifestyle modification/exercise routines to reduce the amount of damage done and even alternative medicines to help sufferers live a relatively pain-free life. The big thing here is monitoring and detecting inflammation early enough to prevent disability.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Health & Beauty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.