Affiliation:
1. ERCIYES UNIVERSITY, SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
2. Özalp State Hospital
Abstract
The aim of this study is to present a general picture of patients who applied to the rheumatology outpatient clinic in the first 16 months of the COVID-19pandemic. Patients who applied to the rheumatology outpatient clinic between March 2020 and August 2021 were included in the study. Patients’ clinical and demographic characteristics, the received drug treatments at their last admissions, and the outpatient clinic visits of patients within the specified 16-month period were evaluated retrospectively. A total of 869 patients were included, and their mean age was 48.51 ± 12.84 years; of these, 658 (75.71%) were female and 211 (24.29%) were male. The most common disease diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis (29.57%). The average number of hospital visits in 2021 was significantly higher than in 2020. Also, patients who received both biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) and conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (csDMARDs)/immunosuppressives had a significantly higher number of admissions than those who did not (for all, p
Subject
General Materials Science
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