JIA at NRAS

In 2012 NRAS conducted a review of JIA and JIA services across the UK with a view to being able to start to provide a much more comprehensive service for families and young people affected by JIA. The first thing we did was to spend a year producing a major report, ‘A Focus on JIA’ by visiting rheumatology and paediatric rheumatology centres across the UK to find out what the state of JIA service provision was. We talked to many different clinicians and allied health professionals, parents, young people with JIA and NHS Managers and effectively mapped what service provision looked like.  It is important to be clear to anyone affected by JIA who is reading this or interacting with our JIA-at-NRAS web area that JIA and RA are not the same while they are both inflammatory forms of arthritis they do differ in many ways.  Very importantly JIA does not ‘become’ RA after the age of 16. If you are diagnosed with JIA, then you continue to have JIA, unless your disease goes into remission, after the age of 16. Another important aspect of JIA is that it is not one disease, it has a number of different types and you can read about the different types here.