TY - JOUR TI - Mortality profile of patients with rheumatoid arthritis in France and its change in 10 years AU - Avouac, Jérôme AU - Amrouche, Fazia AU - Meune, Christophe AU - Rey, Grégoire AU - Kahan, André AU - Allanore, Yannick T2 - Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism AB - OBJECTIVE: To study the mortality profile of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in France. METHODS: Data were collected between 2000 and 2011 from the French Epidemiological Center for the Medical Causes of Death database; all death certificates from adults that either mentioned RA as an underlying cause of death (UCD) or as an associated cause of death (ACD) were evaluated using multiple-cause-of-death analysis. The different causes of death and their frequency were reported, together with the ratio of observed/expected number of death (O/E ratio) to measure the strength of association between RA listed as an ACD and the corresponding UCD. RESULTS: During the study period, 13,208 deaths related to RA were identified. The mean ± SD age at death was 79 ± 9 years (51% with ≥80 years) and the female/male ratio was 3.2. When RA was the UCD (n = 4597), the main causes of death were cardiovascular (29%) and infectious diseases (22%). When RA was an ACD (n = 8611), the most common UCDs were cardiovascular diseases (35%), neoplasms (14%), respiratory disease (9%), and infectious diseases (7%). The overall O/E ratio was >1 for infectious (3.58), respiratory (1.38), and cardiovascular diseases (1.25), but was