impact of gender and age-at-onset on clinical and medical features of rheumatoid arthritis inwestern algerian population

Background: this study aimed to demonstrate the gender and age-at-onset differences in rheumatoid arthritis (ra) in the western algerian population and their impacts on patients’ clinical features and medical management. methods: a retrospective cross-sectional study was carried out at the internal medicine and functional rehabilitation departments (university hospital of sidi-bel-abbes region) based on medical records of over 306 ra patients diagnosed between 2016 and 2019 according to acr 1987 criteria. late-onset ra (lora) was defined as disease onset at 51 years of age or older. all data were processed and analyzed via spss 22.0. results: we enrolled 306 rheumatoid arthritis patients (85% women) with a mean age-at-onset of 52.47 ± 12.14. algerian ra women were more at risk of developing type 2 diabetes (p = 0.035), hypertension (p = 0.003), and thyroid disorders (p = 0.05).we did not find any significant relationship between clinical features, laboratory data, and gender. the lora group comprised 60.5% of our study population with a higher number of comorbidities such as hypertension (p < 0.001), osteoporosis (p = 0.007), and scleroderma (p = 0.014). nonetheless, we found evidence of an association between positive anti-ccp, rf rate, and age-at-onset (p = 0.001 and p < 0.001, respectively). conclusions: algerian ra women with lora presented a higher prevalence of comorbidities, while young-onset ra (yora) was associated with a high rate of rf.