When it was created in 1982, the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center comprised one-and-a-half rheumatologists: its founder, Lynell W. Klassen, MD, MACR, and Gerald Moore, MD, who later received formal training at the NIH and now serves as senior associate dean for academic affairs. Thirty-five years later, the…
CHICAGO—On a Saturday morning in Chicago, Chester V. Oddis, MD, director of the Myositis Center at the University of Pittsburgh, explained to a crowded room of about 500 rheumatologists attending the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April how best to use myositis autoantibodies in clinical care. He began with an overview of the different types of…
The ACR and EULAR have approved and released response criteria for adult and juvenile myositis, the result of a collaborative initiative that involved the International Myositis Assessment and Clinical Studies Group (IMACS) and the Paediatric Rheumatology International Trials Organisation (PRINTO). The decade-long collaboration was consensus driven, examined multiple clinical data sets and natural history studies,…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Ongoing investigation into the disease mechanisms of inflammatory myopathies is generating needed information for the development of potential future therapeutic targets, and current data from clinical trials have shed light on myopathy concerns in different cohorts of patients. These issues were all discussed in a session titled Muscle Biology, Myositis, and Myopathies I during…
Antisynthetase syndrome (AS) is strongly associated with the presence of antibodies to aminoacyl-transfer RNA (tRNA) synthetases (ARSs) that are implicated in the pathogenesis of myositis and interstitial lung disease (ILD). Antibodies against eight antisynthetases have been identified and are detected in 16–26% of patients with idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM).1 Serum assays for five of these…
SAN FRANCISCO—An athletic 19-year-old male has an episode of rhabdomyolysis, a breakdown of muscle tissue that leads to contents of muscle fiber in the blood, after weight-lifting and basketball drills. But his labs come back normal. He cuts down on his exercise, but has a second episode four months later, then finally sees a rheumatologist…
SAN FRANCISCO—A 40-year-old woman shows up in the clinic with scarring alopecia, with an area of hyperpigmentation on the rim of her scalp, extending from just behind the temple to behind her ears. An examination with a dermatoscope shows hyperkeratotic follicular plugging. The case—in this example, the discoid form of cutaneous lupus erythematosus (DLE)—is one…
SAN FRANCISCO—A 40-year-old woman shows up in the clinic with scarring alopecia, with an area of hyperpigmentation on the rim of her scalp, extending from just behind the temple to behind her ears. An examination with a dermatoscope shows hyperkeratotic follicular plugging. The case—in this example, the discoid form of cutaneous lupus erythematosus (DLE)—is one…
Inside the pathophysiology, clinical presentations of chronic pruritus
Without a single set of diagnostic criteria for identifying polymyositis, dermatomyositis, or myositis and scant evidence-based therapeutic guidelines, these rare muscle diseases can be hard to manage