3 Early Signs and Symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis
The Arthritis Foundation estimates that more than 1.3 million people in America have rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis is a less common form of arthritis than osteoarthritis, affecting over 30 million Americans. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune and inflammatory disease, meaning your immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys your body’s healthy cells. Therefore, the affected parts of your body, including your hands, wrists, and knees, tend to become painful and inflamed. Hui Kang MD is a rheumatoid arthritis specialist offering a treatment plan to minimize the condition’s associated symptoms. As a result, that can prevent this autoimmune and inflammatory disease from severely compromising the function of your different body organs, like the heart, lungs, eyes, and skin.
Consequently, below are some of the early signs and symptoms of RA.
- Fatigue
You may constantly feel exhausted, whether you have early or late-stage rheumatoid arthritis. The fatigue you experience may result from the body spending too much energy trying to eliminate the chronic systemic inflammatory disease and initiate recovery. But you can also feel tired because of sleep deprivation, anemia, and the prescribed medications you use.
Because you are always tired, that may affect your emotions and mood, productivity, and sexual desire.
- Malaise
Rheumatoid arthritis makes you feel ill and uncomfortable constantly. Therefore, you may show signs of being unwell, including loss of appetite, overwhelming sensitivity to smells, and fatigue. You will feel sick because your immune system is destroying healthy body tissues and joints, which causes swelling, pain, and discomfort.
- Restricted joint movement
Rheumatoid arthritis may affect different joints in your body, including your fingers, wrists, ankles, knees, and feet. Often at the start of the condition, you will experience pain and inflammation in the smaller joints of your toes and fingers. As a result, bending your wrists, toes, or fingers may be difficult. As RA worsens, the larger joints in your hips, shoulders, and knees become affected.
Especially in adults, rheumatoid arthritis often attacks more than one joint during its early stages. Because rheumatoid arthritis attacks multiple joints, you will find it difficult to move freely. Your joints will be stiff, tender, red, numb, warm, painful, and inflamed.
You may also experience other rare symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, such as chest pain, weight loss, dry eyes and mouth, rheumatoid nodules, low to mild fever, limping, and anemia. Rheumatoid nodules are firm lumps that appear under your skin next to the joint affected by rheumatoid arthritis.
Chronic inflammation due to rheumatoid arthritis may also compromise the ability of the bone marrow to produce and release red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Red blood cells help in the transportation of oxygen throughout your body. On the other hand, white blood cells and platelets assist in preventing infections and controlling bleeding, respectively.
If you do not treat your rheumatoid arthritis immediately, you become at high risk of severe joint damage and deformities. You may also have other complications like carpal tunnel syndrome, inflammation of organs, stroke, and heart attack.
Contact Hui Kang, MD, today to schedule an appointment with a rheumatoid arthritis specialist.
