OBJECTIVES: To investigate the impact that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has on patients’ ability to stay in work, using data from the Burden of Rheumatoid Arthritis across Europe: a Socioeconomic Survey (BRASS).

METHODS: Data were extracted from BRASS, a societal perspective observational RA dataset across 10 European countries (EU5, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and Romania). 476 RA specialising clinicians provided information on 4,079 adult patients; of these, 2,087 patients completed corresponding questionnaires about the burden of RA.

Descriptive analysis was used to explore the association between disease duration, disease activity and the proportion of patients who had stopped working or retired early due to RA. Level of pain experienced was also evaluated descriptively across categories of disease activity. The relationship between early retirement and disease duration was further explored using logistic regression where disease duration was modelled as an explanatory variable against the binary early retirement outcome, and adjusted for covariates including age, gender and BMI.

RESULTS: Adequate model fit determined. An odds ratio (OR) of 1.043 (p-value <0.00) and average marginal effect of 0.6% (p-value <0.00) per year of disease duration were calculated. The marginal effect was non-linear, increasing yearly with confounders held constant. The predicted probability for a patient to have retired due to RA after disease duration 1-5, 6-10 and >10 years was 13.5%, 15.9% and 21.5% respectively. The likelihood that a patient had stopped working or retired early due to RA in the first 1-5 years of the disease increased across levels of current disease activity, with 5%, 9% and 15% across ‘remission’, ‘mild/moderate’ and ‘severe’ categories respectively. A ‘moderate/severe’ level of pain attributable to RA was found in 19% of patients in remission.

CONCLUSIONS: Analysis suggests both disease duration and severity have an impact on the likelihood for a patient to retire early/stop working due to their RA.