JIA Awareness Week 2023 (3-7 July)

04 June 2023

The National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS) is proud to announce the launch of 2023’s Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Awareness Week (JIA AW). 

JIA-at-NRAS started JIAAW in 2022 with the aim to raise the awareness of the condition by educating and informing friends, family, employers and the general population about what juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is and the devastating impact it can have on people’s lives. 

The aim of the campaign is to raise awareness of JIA and eliminate the misconceptions held by many about what JIA is. During JIA Awareness Week we hope to educate and inform friends, family, schools, employers as well as the general population about JIA and it’s impact on all aspects of a young person’s life. JIA is very different to other forms of arthritis such as osteoarthritis (OA), in that JIA can strike at any age under 16 and around half of those children diagnosed each year will have the condition throughout their lives. It is an auto-immune disease, which means that in addition to affecting the joints, it can impact internal organs and quite commonly the eyes. There are serious consequences to getting a late diagnosis or a lack of targeted appropriate treatment. 

For JIAAW 2023 the theme is #BustingJIAMyths, focusing on dispelling the myths that surround this currently incurable invisible condition. The JIA community, people living with JIA, their families/carers and Healthcare professionals are only too aware of the misconceptions that other people can have around inflammatory arthritis, and we want to spread awareness to raise the profile of this condition with a ‘JIA Mythbuster’ quiz that all can take part in. 

Throughout the week we will be sharing videos and stories on our social media platforms, so please do get involved by sharing and using the hashtag  #BustingJIAMyths  and #JIAAW203. The more people see and take the quiz the more we can spread awareness of living with this condition!