Surgical rehabilitation.

There is hardly any other disorder where the possibility of replacing destroyed joints by artificial ones has transformed the functional outcome so decisively as in rheumatoid arthritis. The advances achieved in surgery may even be regarded as the most important result of any research on rheumatoid arthritis as published in recent years. Arthroplastics account for almost half of all interventions in our own statistics which cover almost 6000 operations on patients with this disease.

[D-penicillamine and wound healing in patients with rheumatoid arthritis].

The inhibiting effect of D-penicillamine on the collagen metabolism in animal experiments and in some published clinical observations appear to confirm the assumption that this drug might retard the wound healing after surgery. Therefore the authors studied wound healing following 107 orthopedic operations in 49 RA patients: 36 operations on patients without any basic treatment, 48 during D-PA, 18 during gold, 4 during azathioprine and 1 during Resochin. Retarded wound healing (up to 4 weeks after the date of the operation) was observed 6 times: in 2 out of 36 operations (5.