Customize Your Meeting Schedule
By using the ACR’s Online Program Planner, you can explore different conference sessions and workshops that will be held at this year’s annual meeting, as well as pinpoint topics related to your specific areas of interest. With the Online Program Planner, you can browse conference sessions by type, speaker, title, date, and time or use the new abstract search feature to search abstracts by topic areas, presenters’ last names, presentation titles and numbers, keywords, or institutions. Additionally, abstracts that report results of a clinical trial not yet supported by a regulatory agency will be searchable by trial phase and type.
You can also click on “My Itinerary” to print your customized meeting schedule or download it directly to your PDA—allowing you to keep your schedule at your fingertips.
Interstitial lung disease (ILD) and the rheumatic disease: Paul Dellaripa, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the division of rheumatology at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital, both in Boston, is the coordinator of this year’s study group and has created a program designed to provide a forum to discuss and advance clinical investigation into ILD associated with rheumatic diseases. Outside of scleroderma, lung manifestations in rheumatic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Sjögren’s, and inflammatory myositis are rare and poorly understood. This year’s program will focus on creating a network of interested groups to move toward a viable database across institutions and to discuss ongoing clinical projects that focus on ILD in the rheumatic diseases.
ACR/EULAR academic exchange program: This program seeks to bring together young academic rheumatologists from Europe and the United States to discuss basic and translational research programs in order to foster the exchange of ideas and continuous collaboration. This year’s study group—co-coordinated by Mariana J. Kaplan, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine, division of rheumatology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Ulf Müller-Ladner, MD, of the University Giessen and director of the department of rheumatology and clinical immunology at Kerckhoff Clinic in Bad Nauheim, Germany—will highlight the importance of aging in the pathogenesis of chronic inflammatory disorders. In addition, two keynote speakers will address the group, followed by an abstract presentation session from members of the exchange program.
WHO burden of disease (GBD) (musculoskeletal) international update: Group coordinators Lyn March, MD, PhD, associate professor of rheumatology at the University of Sydney in Australia; Richard Osborne, PhD, associate professor at the the University of Melbourne in Australia; and Anthony Woolf, MD, PhD, Hon professor of rheumatology at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, U.K., have created a study group that will allow attendees to be part of an international project aiming to describe the prevalence, incidence, and disability burden of osteoarthritis, RA, back pain, gout, osteoporosis, and other musculoskeletal disorders across all regions of the world. The group plans to introduce the concepts and processes involved in estimating the global burden of (and injuries and risk factors in) these diseases while discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the original WHO GBD Reports for Musculoskeletal Conditions. This will provide attendees an outline of how improvements will be made to better position musculoskeletal disorders against other conditions at the international level.
