RADAI-5 to monitor rheumatoid arthritis.

Providing the physician with sufficient information about the disease course can be regarded as the most important requirement for any disease assessment tool besides easy applicability and time-sparing documentation. Applying the RADAI-5 in daily routine provides the patient's view at any time completing the questionnaire. In a first study, the RADAI-5 resulted to be highly significantly correlated to the RADAI, and all composite indexes. Changes of the RADAI-5, the DAS28-ESR, and the CDAI were significantly correlated, indicating the instrument's sensitivity to change. A second study including 392 RA patients led to the establishment of thresholds for disease activity categories according to the RADAI-5, as follows: 0.0 up to 1.4 for a remission-like state, 1.6 up to 3.0 for mild disease activity, 3.2 up to 5.4 for moderate and from 5.6 up to 10.0 for high disease activity. In a third study, remission according to the RADAI-5 appeared to be highly specific for the ACR/EULAR criteria for remission The RADAI-5 questionnaire constitutes an easily applicable tool for routine RA monitoring, providing physicians with reliable information about the disease course and sensitivity enough to sound the alarm should complications occur.