Rheumatoid Arthritis Affecting the Hip Joint.

Garrod (1890) gave a figure of 14 6 per cent. hip joint involvement in 500 patients with polyarthritis, and 6 years later Brabazon (1896) mentioned hip joint changes in 21 of 100 patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Coates and Delicati (1931) found sixteen patients with hip joint abnormalities in 100 consecutive cases at Bath. The statistical analysis of rheumatoid arthritis by Lewis-Faning (1950) showed hip joint changes in 16 per cent. of 532 patients. Forestier, Arlet, and Jacqueline (1951) found hipjoint involvement in 10 per cent. of their patients at the first examination, In a radiological study, Dilsen, McEwen, Poppel, Gersh, Di Tata, and Carmel (1962) found hip joint abnormalities in 33 per cent. of 89 rheumatoid arthritics, but these were a selected group of more severe cases. Weil, Perroy, and Guillon (1951) found hip arthropathy in 24 of thirty severely affected long-stay hospital in-patients with rheumatoid arthritis and, after excluding other aetiologies, nineteen out of 25 patients appeared to have rheumatoid arthritis of one or both hips. They stressed the relatively early onset of hip involvement and the frequency of acetabular protrusions and femoral head destruction. Estimates of the frequency of hip joint involvement in rheumatoid arthritis, therefore, lie between 10 and 33 per cent., but unfortunately none of these figures are satisfactory since either the diagnostic criteria were not defined or the series were selected. Material