Post-Chikungunya Rheumatism - Rheumatology Follow-up of Patients After 15 Years

Reunion Island was struck in 2005-2006 by the most severe Chikungunya outbreak (seroprevalence 38% (Gérardin et al., 2013)) in a developed but previously non-immunized country, providing an unique opportunity for studying Chikungunya-related joint symptoms and their long-term evolution. In a previous study, the investigators demonstrated that at least 17/73 patients initially classified as Chikungunya-related inflammatory joint diseases after 40 months still suffered from inflammatory joint symptoms fullfilling validated classification criteria after 13 years (Guillot et al., 2020). However, in this monocentric study, the investigators did not consider the full spectrum of Chikungunya-related rheumatic diseases, the population was not fully representative and the sample size was not sufficient to perform statistical analyses nor identify poor prognosis markers. In the RHUMATOCHIK cohort study, 307 patients were evaluated by 4 rheumatologists 2 months after the infection, 83% and 43% reported persistent joint pain and joint swelling respectively after 32 months in potentially biased telephone interviews (Bouquillard et al., 2018).

In this context, the present study aims at performing a systematic clinical rheumatologic re-evaluation of the RHUMATOCHIK patients after 15 years, in order to precisely describe and classify the full spectrum of persistent Chikungunya-related joint diseases in a larger population.

After a telephone interview and screening questionnaire, these patients will be clinically re-evaluated by a second rheumatologist in a multicenter transversal follow-up study.