Background: Obesity is abnormal accumulation of fat in the body, which led to many health problems that will reduce the life expectancy. Arthritis is joints inflammation that cause many of symptoms such as swelling, tenderness, pain and stiffness of most joints. The arthritis is divided into many types, but the most common types are osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis the last type is the focus of our topic. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an auto-immune, chronic inflammation that can cause damage for joints and other body organs like skin, eyes, lungs, heart and blood vessels.
Objective: The study aimed to investigate the levels of leptin and estrogen hormones in obese women with arthritis. We focused on rheumatoid arthritis especially.
Patients and Methods: The research included ninety women They were distributed into three groups, 30 obese women with body mass index (BMI) more than 25 Kg/m2 for overweight and more than 30 Kg/ for obese, 30 obese women with rheumatoid arthritis which have positive rheumatoid factor (RF) and 30 control women with normal weight and BMI < 25Kg/ and healthy from RA. BMI, WHR was calculated for all participants.
Result: The result of estrogen hormone showed highly significant difference (P≤0.01) in G1 (55.74 ± 9.23), G2 (55.35 ± 11.77) compared to G3 (129.85 ±16.69). While leptin hormone revealed no significant difference among G1 (2102.13 ±78.03), G2 (2005.80 ±23.81) and G3 (1931.27 ±22.91).
Conclusion: We concluded that leptin levels did not differ among the three groups. Conversely estrogen levels showed highly difference between the three groups.