My Rheumatoid Factor test is positive. This means I have rheumatoid arthritis?
A rheumatoid factor test, alone, has very little weight in the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, whether to confirm the diagnosis if it was positive or to exclude the diagnosis if it was negative.
In other words, the rheumatologist does not rely on it to the extent that patients think. You can have a positive test and we tell you forget it, you definitely don't have rheumatoid arthritis. The reason is that we diagnose rheumatoid arthritis based on your symptoms and based on the signs we find when we examine you and not based on any lab test result.
At the same time, there are other causes, many causes in fact, that can result in a positive rheumatoid factor test. It can even be positive in 5 to 10 percent of normal people who don't have any diseases.
The problem arises because the test is called rheumatoid test.. The test is named after the name of the disease rheumatoid arthritis. When they gave this test its name many years back, more than 70 years back, they thought at that time it was positive only in patients who have rheumatoid arthritis. Our knowledge, over the years, changed but the name of the test did not. This is where the confusion happens to patients but of course not to us, doctors who are specialized in the diagnosing and treating the disease.
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This post was prepared and published by Dr. Hatem Eleishi. Dr. Hatem Eleishi is a professor of rheumatology at Cairo university (Egypt) and is especially dedicated to supporting arthritis patients with online educational videos and articles about arthritis causes and treatment. He also runs a rheumatology clinic in Cairo and a center for online medical consultations that, in addition to providing online rheumatology consultations, also provides online medical consultations in several different medical specialties by expert consultants from Egypt, Canada and the United States.
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