Carcinoma of the lung simulating early rheumatoid arthritis.

It is well known that lung affections may be accompanied by so-called hypertrophic pulmonary osteo-arthropathy, which seems to be almost regularly associated with mild joint symptoms. Bamberger (1889) and Marie (1890) first studied this syndrome, but little attention has been paid to the misleading resemblance of these joint symptoms to those seen in the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis, though individual cases appear in the literature (Craig, 1937; Fried, 1943; Ellman, 1947; Pattison and others, 1951; and Frank, 1952). It was our main object to investigate how frequently the clinician finds difficulty in the differential diagnosis of the joint symptoms accompanying carcinoma of the lung.