It’s known as being a group of Systemic Inflammatory Disorders. Juvenile chronic arthritis affects children that are younger than sixteen years of age and furthermore there are three major subtypes of it: pauciarticular, polyarticular and systemic. Way back in the year 1864 the first case of juvenile chronic arthritis was discovered and in the year 1896 the first survey was conducted by a person called George Frederick Still who noted nineteen different cases and who also formulated the main subtypes of the disease. That is why for a time the condition was actually known as the Still’s disease.

Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis

Juvenile chronic arthritis is known by various names and in the United States the name for this disease is Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. The main criteria in making a diagnosis of the disease is that the patient must be less than sixteen years of age and to establish the true causes it may require exclusion and the symptoms should have persisted for a minimum of six weeks and as long as even three months.

Juvenile chronic arthritis is known to affect between nine and twenty-five children out of every one hundred thousand and the prevalence is estimated at being between twelve and one hundred and thirteen per one hundred thousand children. As for gender disposition it has been found that the ratio of females to males is between two and three female for every male patient. Furthermore, juvenile chronic arthritis affects Caucasians more than it does any other racial type and is very rare among the black populace.

The treatment and management of juvenile chronic arthritis must aim to provide relief from pain, preserve proper functioning of the joints and maintain the child’s normal growth as well as psycho-social development. This means that doctors need to use a multi-therapist approach which in turn means that rheumatologists, pediatricians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and orthopedists and also ophthalmologists might need to work in unison to affect necessary treatment.

The good news is that juvenile chronic arthritis treatment does in most cases lead to positive results and the outcome is usually good, if not excellent in most cases.

Systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is characterized by joint swelling and also by fever and skin rashes that however are of a light nature and sometimes internal organs too can be affected. Because a gentleman named George Frederick Still first discovered this form of juvenile arthritis, the condition is often also called Still’s disease.