At OMERACT 2010 the draft ACR-EULAR remission criteria were criticized during a workshop because participants felt insufficient patient-important information was incorporated. A working group was formed to tackle this problem. Qualitative work and surveys published by this group have established that pain, fatigue, and independence are the most important domains that patients consider to decide whether they are in remission (‘disease activity as good as gone’).
The next phase was an ambitious longitudinal study to propose, and where necessary validate instruments for these domains, and then decide whether information from these instruments was such that the current ACR-EULAR definition would need to be changed.