First off, welcome. This is a great place to hang out- lots of kind, interesting, knowledgeable people, and the coffee's always on.

You will find that labs are mildly interesting in RA, but not much more. Plenty of people have serious disease activity with normal labs, others will have one or two tests out of range and others normal. Did they run an anti-CCP test on you? That's the new fave.

So, methotrexate. How do you feel? A few aches and pains a few times a month? Needing a winch and a bottle of Vicodin to get out of bed in the morning? Methotrexate sounds scary, but remember that it has been used for decades, and most folks do just fine with it. The best thing you can do at this point is to build a good relationship with your rheumatologist. You'll be seeing plenty of each other.

RA treatment is more about symptom relief than anything else. In fact, you are considered in remission based primarily on symptoms (

RA treatment is more about symptom relief than anything else. In fact, you are considered in remission based primarily on symptoms

Most good theumies also base the aggressiveness of treatment on severity of symptoms. So if your symptoms are impeding normal activities - then aggressive treatment is warranted. If your symptoms are mild and go away with OTC meds after a couple hours - more conservative treatments may be called for.

And it is also based on the patient's tolerance of potential side effects. Some on here will only touch aggressive meds after trying all other avenues of treatment first. Others bypassed the conservative treatments and went straight to aggressive. It's a very personal decision. After all, only you will have to live in your body and deal with the consequences of the treatments.

(Entire body of my post didn't go through the first time. Go figure?)

It really depends on what your anti-ccp comes in at along with your person pain level and "disfunction" right now. The best treatment protocol these days includes aggressive measures. The goal is to fully arrest the disease and set you into remission.
If you can achieve that on your own, great. (like with non-inflammatory foods and such) But, most of us need the dmards to arrest the disease. My initial aggressive treatment halted my disease for a long time. And at least for now, I'm really glad.

I actually just got the result back from the Anti-CCP and it is normal. So, the only positive lab result I have is the RA Factor of 17.9. I'm just not sure about taking methotrexate when most of my labs are normal and the RA Factor is just over normal. Thoughts anyone? Anyone else in this same boat? Thanks!

Hi and welcome.
I am fairly new to this myself. My rheumy is the exact opposite. My labs are fairly normal except for a positive anti-ccp on the lower side of things. He said that if the symptoms are not interfering with life there is no need to treat more aggressively (if there isn't evidence of joint damage of course).
I would say it depends on the level of pain you are in. Personally I am going to try and stay off the harder drugs as long as I can.