Preventing adverse outcomes in individuals who have rheumatic diseases is a daily goal for rheumatologists. For example, rheumatologists prescribe medications and perform screening to prevent erosions in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), renal failure in systemic lupus erythematosus and flares across all diseases. Many of these actions are classified as secondary or tertiary prevention, because individuals have…
(Reuters Health)—Obese people with knee osteoarthritis (OA) may find greater symptom relief when they lose larger amounts of weight, a recent study suggests. Researchers examined data on 240 obese adults with pain from knee OA who were participating in an 18-month experiment to see how diet alone or diet plus exercise affected their health. Participants…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Effective pharmacotherapy of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is not associated with meaningful improvements in mental health, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis. “We were surprised by the small effect sizes for mental-health outcomes across all of the treatments included in this review, but particularly for the anti-TNF versus disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD)…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Various image analysis techniques show sex-specific patterns of bone deterioration at the hip, suggesting that men and women should be assessed differently for hip fracture risk, researchers say. “One major contribution of this work is the integration of data-driven computational anatomy approaches, which showed that proximal femur fragility linked to fracture seems…
Denosumab is now approved to treat adults with glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis…
Aging bones lose their ability to mechanoadapt, but new research suggests age-related adaptation failure may result from insufficient mechanical stimulus…
New research examines the adherence rates for system-level performance measures in Canada. Using data from the Canadian Early Arthritis Cohort that spanned eight years, researchers determined the percentage of RA patients seen in yearly follow-up with the number of gaps between visits, the percentage of RA patients treated with a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug and number days from diagnosis to the initiation of treatment. The results: High adherence to system-level performance measures was found in this early RA cohort, with small declines in performance with the increasing length overtime…
Ixekizumab is the first agent approved by the FDA for treating plaque psoriasis to include labeling for psoriasis in the genital area…
Could your lupus patients benefit from limiting exposure to chemicals at home and in the medical environment? It’s a strong possibility, according to the preliminary findings of a research team investigating DNA methylation disruption in patients with SLE…
New research suggests the downregulation of CD3ζ contributes to the altered function of NK cells in SLE patients, which may contribute to the increased risk of viral infections in these patients…