This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Ronald E. Domen, MD
Bethlehem, Pa

JAMA. 1992;268(19):2649.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The report by Dequeker and Rico¹ describing rheumatoidlike lesions in a mid 15th- to early 16th-century painting, parallels a similar report by Appelboom et al.² At that time, evidence was also presented to support the paleopathological evidence for rheumatoid arthritis well before the 15th to 17th centuries.³

American Indian skeletal material from Dickson Mounds, Ill, has yielded a case of rheumatoid arthritis in an elderly man from the Mississippian period (700 to 1650 AD).⁴ Rothschild et al⁵ have also published convincing evidence for the New World presence of rheumatoid arthritis during the Late Archaic Period (3000 to 5000 years before the present). Other cases have been reported.³

To date, published reports support the possibility that rheumatoid arthritis originated in the New World and entered the Old World after the 15th century.⁵ The paleopathological evidence supports the presence of rheumatoid arthritis . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?