A new approach to defining inactive disease, minimal disease activity and parent- and child-acceptable symptom state in juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Background Recent advances in treatment of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) have markedly increased the potential for achieving a remission or minimal disease activity (MDA) state. So far, these states have been defined using a categorical model, which requires simultaneous fulfillment of multiple criteria. However, a dimensional model, based on pooling individual measures into a composite score, has the advantage of providing one summary number on a continuous scale.