Introduction: ‘Why is there persistent disease despite aggressive therapy of rheumatoid arthritis?’

During the last 20 years, obvious progress has been made in the care of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This results from the combination of better diagnosis, earlier use of classic drugs, and the introduction of new targeted therapies. Despite these positive results, RA remains a chronic disease and induction of remission is still rarely obtained [1]. It is as if RA were a series of lost battles. More recently, although RA care improved, chronic inflammation was shown to have an effect on mortality, specifically from cardiovascular events. The goal of this series of short articles on RA chronicity is to give readers of Arthritis Research & Therapy the views of leading experts in the field. This combines lessons coming from daily clinical observations to a better understanding of basic molecular changes in mesenchymal cells.