The nature and severity of symptoms are the deciding factors in their interpretation, by both the GP and the patient. Both the patient's disease recognition and his/her subsequent interaction with the doctor is influenced by the patient's body awareness and general attitude towards going to the doctor. The results showed that the greater the patient's body awareness, the better the disease recognition, the fewer barriers to contacting the GP and the shorter the delay in doing so. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

BackgroundEarly initiation of effective treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) leads to improved clinical and radiological status in the patients. Thus, there is a need to decrease the time from patients experience their first joint symptoms to initiation of treatment. The patient’ social context may influence the period from the patients experience their first joint symptoms until they present their symptoms to their general practitioner (GP) (patient delay (PD))ObjectivesFirstly, to explore whether socioeconomic and other factors influence PD in persons referred to a rheumatologist due to suspicion of RA. Secondly, if socioeconomic factors affected whether the patients subsequently received a diagnosis with inflammatory arthritis (IA)MethodsWe developed a survey based on previous Danish1,2 and UK3 studies regarding symptom interpretation and PD together with two patient research partners. We asked consecutive patients, referred to a rheumatology outpatient clinic or a private rheumatologist in the Region of Southern Denmark, with a suspicion of RA, to complete the survey online or in a paper version before examination by a rheumatologist. We used STATA/IC 15.0 for descriptive statistics, univariate, and multivariate logistic regression analyses.ResultsFrom December 2016 to July 2017, 144 patients completed the survey. In total 86 (60%) were female, mean age 55 (SD 15.3). In total 76 (53%) had short PD (0–3 months), 51 (35%) intermediate or long PD (≥4 months) (12% missing answers); 71 (49%) totally or partially agreed that their symptoms had a gradual onset. Three to seven months after the survey, 45 (22%) had received a diagnosis of some sort of inflammatory arthritis (IA). In the following analyses age was dicotomized (