CHICAGO—Delia Chiaramonte, MD, associate director of education at the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, presented the newest thinking on pain to a gathering of rheumatologists at the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. She began by explaining that pain is more than nociception. Nociception stimulates nerves to…
CHICAGO—Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, presented on emerging concepts of viral infections and rheumatic disease at the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. “We are at a pivotal point in rheumatology in understanding the relationship between viruses and rheumatic disease,” began Dr. Calabrese. “It’s a very exciting time.” Dr. Calabrese…
CHICAGO—A clustering of cases in Lyme, Conn., in 1975 led to the discovery of Lyme disease. Allen C. Steere, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, investigated that outbreak, and he shared his knowledge of Lyme disease with rheumatologists gathered at the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. He explained that Lyme arthritis…
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…
CHICAGO—Warren Piette, MD, professor of dermatology at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, updated rheumatologists on the topic of cutaneous vasculitis at the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. He began by explaining that the current vasculitis criteria developed by the ACR in 1990 and the Chapel Hill Consensus Conference (CHCC) in 1994 are inadequate to incorporate…
CHICAGO—Doruk Erkan, MD, MPH, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, described recent developments in the field of antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) to the rheumatologists gathered for the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. He introduced APS as a “field with limited data and lots of controversies,” although,…
CHICAGO—Caryn A. Libbey, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, described the evolving in our understanding of amyloid at the ACR’s State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. Amyloidosis is a rare disease that is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. “Even though this disease has been around for 150 years, I still consider it…
On July 3, the Rheumatology Research Foundation announced the names of 63 rheumatology trainees, educators, clinicians, investigators and health professionals who will receive Foundation-funded awards. In support of the Foundation’s mission to improve the health of people with rheumatic diseases, the awards help recruit and train the next generation of rheumatology professionals and advance research…
A recent study examined the relationship between increased BMI and antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated vasculitis treatment with glucocorticoids. The results: Weight gain was independently associated with reductions in disease activity, increased glucocorticoid exposure and randomization to rituximab. The most significant increases in BMI occurred during the first six months of treatment, and newly diagnosed patients were more likely to experience an increase in BMI…
These researchers investigated whether rituximab, an anti-B cell therapy, improves symptoms of fatigue and oral dryness in patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome (SS). The multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trial included a health economic analysis. There were no significant improvements in any outcome measure with rituximab except for unstimulated salivary flow. The study concludes that rituximab is neither clinically effective nor cost effective in this patient population…