Letters to the Editor

rheumatoid arthritis predict increased mortality in patients with early arthritis: results from the Norfolk Arthritis Register SIR, The absence of a gold standard for diagnosis in RA has led to the development of classification criteria, pri-marily for the purpose of standardization of entry into clin-ical trials and other clinical studies. Previously, increased mortality was identified in patients defined as having RA by the 1987 ACR classification criteria [1]. In recent years, a consensus within the rheumatology community has emerged for early initiation of treatment in RA. The 1987 criteria are insufficiently sensitive at this point in the nat-ural history of the disease. To address this, new classifi-cation criteria were published in 2010 [2] and have been shown to identify a greater proportion of patients a