Prevalence and clinical characteristics of patients with rheumatoid arthritis with interstitial lung disease using unstructured healthcare data and machine learning.

Objectives: Real-world data regarding rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and its association with interstitial lung disease (ILD) is still scarce. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of RA and ILD in patients with RA (RAILD) in Spain, and to compare clinical characteristics of patients with RA with and without ILD using natural language processing (NLP) on electronic health records (EHR).

Methods: Observational case-control, retrospective and multicentre study based on the secondary use of unstructured clinical data from patients with adult RA and RAILD from nine hospitals between 2014 and 2019.