Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week (RAAW) 16 – 22 September 2024

This year for RAAW 2024  the theme is #STOPtheStereotype focusing on dispelling the frustrating stereotypes that surround this incurable, invisible condition. The 450,000 people living in the UK with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) face people making assumptions about their condition, hearing comments along the lines of “you look fine how can you be unwell?’, ‘you are far too young to have arthritis’, ‘It’s just your joints getting old?’ amongst many others.

Since the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS) was founded in 2001, one of our key aims has been to increase public understanding and awareness of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as distinct from other forms of arthritis. Whilst we have come a long way, there still remains a significant challenge in clarifying the misconceptions based around RA.

In 2013, NRAS started a campaign called Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Week (RAAW) to raise the awareness of the condition and eliminate these misconceptions by educating and informing friends, family, employers of those with RA and the general population about what rheumatoid arthritis truly is. RA is very different to osteoarthritis (OA) in that it can strike at many age over 16. It is an auto-immune disease, which is a key differentiating factor to OA and means that in addition to joints, it can affect internal organs such as the heart, lungs, eyes. There are very serious consequences to late diagnosis or lack of targeted appropriate treatment.