CHICAGO—Amid what she called a “dizzying array of choices” for rheumatoid arthritis (RA)—from anti-TNF and anti-IL6-receptor therapies to B cell depletion to new biosimilar options—disease treatment should still revolve around several basic concepts, an expert said at the ACR State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. Joan Bathon, MD, chief of rheumatology at Columbia University in New…
CHICAGO—The placebo effect in treating pain in osteoarthritis (OA) should not be discounted, an expert said at the ACR State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. It’s especially important to accept the effect as real considering that trials of pain therapies in OA generate such high placebo effects (typically at least 40%) and that OA treatment options,…
CHICAGO—About 30 years ago, pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and interstitial lung disease (ILD) began to outpace renal crisis as the main causes of death in scleroderma (SSc). But treating these lung complications has proved vexing for clinicians. There is no easy way to predict who will develop PAH. There is no telltale antibody and no…
CHICAGO—When a patient with rheumatic disease suffers recurrent infections, has a history of multiple autoimmune diseases or presents with atypical autoimmune syndromes, clinicians should consider the possibility of an immune deficiency, an expert said at the ACR State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium in April. W. Winn Chatham, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at…
CHICAGO—As good an option as hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is for many patients with rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and especially lupus, safety must be an important consideration, an expert said at this April’s ACR State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium. The use of the antimalarial has become a controversial subject, with clinicians trying to balance the drug’s disease-modifying…
CHICAGO—The promise of precision medicine—the tailoring of treatment to a given patient based on genetics and other factors—has probably been best illustrated in oncology, with therapies targeted specifically to markers expressed on tumors. But rheumatology is in the thick of precision medicine as well, said Judith James, MD, PhD, chair of the arthritis and clinical…