Viruses produce arthritis by infecting synovial tissue during systemic infection or by provoking an immunologic reaction that involves joints. As many as 50 percent of women report persistent arthralgias and 10 percent frank arthritis within 3 days of the rash that follows natural infection with rubella virus and within 2 to 6 weeks after receipt of live virus vaccine.
Episodes of symmetric inflammation of fingers, wrists, and knees uncommonly recur for longer than a year, but a syndrome of chronic fatigue, low-grade fever, headaches, and myalgias can persist for months or years.
Intravenous immunoglobulin has been helpful in selected cases.
Self limited monarticular or monarticular or migratory polyarthritis may develop within 2 weeks of the parotitis of mumps; this sequelae is more common in men than in women. Approximately 10 percent of children and 60 percent of women develop arthritis after infection with parvovirus B19.
In adults, arthropathy sometimes occurs without fever or rash. Pain and stiffness, with less prominent swelling primarily of the hands but also of the knees, wrists, and ankles, usually resolve within weeks, although a small proportion of women develop chronic arthropathy.
About 2 weeks before the onset of jaundice, up to 10 percent of persons with acute hepatitis B develop and immune complex-mediated, serum sickness-like reaction with maculopapular rash, urticaria, fever, and arthralgias. Less common developments include symmetric arthritis involving the hands, wrists, elbows, or ankles and morning stiffness that resembles a flare of rheumatoid arthritis.
Symptoms resolve at the time jaundice develops. Painful arthritis involving larger joints often accompanies the fever and rash of several arthropod-bone viral infections, including those caused by chikungunya, O’nyong-nyong, Ross River, Mayaro, and Barmah Forest viruses.
Symmetric arthritis involving the hands and wrists may occur during the convalescent phase of infection with lyumphocytic choriomeningitis virus. Patients infected with an enterovirus frequently report arthralgias, and echovirus has been isolated from patients with acute polyarthritis.
Several arthritis syndromes are associated with HIV infection. Reiter’s syndrome with persistent, painful, lower-extremity oligoarthritis often follows an episode of urethritis in HIV-infected persons.
HIV associated Reiter’s syndrome appears to be extremely common among persons with the HLA-B27 haplotype.
Up to one-third of HIV-infected persons with psoriasis develop psoriatic arthritis. Painless monarthropathy and persistent symmetric polyarthropathy occasionally complicate HIV infection.
Chronic persistent oligoarthrits of the shoulders, wrists, hands, and knees occurs in women infected with human T-lymphotropic virus type I. Synovial thickening, destruction of articular cartilage, and leukemic-appearing atypical lymphocytes in synovial fluid are characteristic, but progression to T cell leukemia is unusual.
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