ABSTRACT
Introduction: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who are positive for anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP)/rheumatoidfactor (RF) have more extra-articular manifestations.Purpose: We tried to evaluate the magnitude of ocular manifestations in RA patients and to find out whether there is anycorrelation of anti-CCP or RF or disease duration to ocular involvement.Materials and Methods: A total of 288 patients diagnosed as RA with ocular symptoms were evaluated. Drug-induced effectsand cataract were excluded from the study.Results: About 18.1% were male and 81.9% were female. The minimum age was 21 and the maximum was 80 years. Theaverage age was 45.66 years. About 36.8% of patients had ocular manifestations. They were bilateral in 66% of patients.Multiple ocular manifestations were shown in 60.4% of patients. Dry eye was observed in 30.5%, anterior uveitis in 6.25%, andepiscleritis and scleritis in 7.6% each. Anti-CCP was present in 86.8% and RF in 78.5% of patients. The duration of diseasewas found to be statistically significant with respect to the presentation of ocular manifestations. Anti-CCP was found to bestatistically significant with respect to ocular manifestations but statistically insignificant in case of RF. No statistical significancewas found between gender and ocular manifestations.Conclusion: So far, no published Indian study with such large number of patients looked at ocular manifestations of RA correlatingwith disease duration and impact of both anti-CCP and RF at the same time. Our study indicates that patients suffering fromRA with anti-CCP positivity and long duration of disease should be evaluated ophthalmologically.