An Unforgettable Story Her name was unforgettable. Not only did we share our given names—Simon and Simone, but her French-Canadian surname was based on this appellation, too. I was the junior resident working on our hospital’s nephrology service when she was admitted for evaluation of progressively worsening kidney disease and an overall failure to thrive….
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…
Brain imaging can distinguish fibromyalgia patients from healthy controls with high sensitivity and specificity, according to two papers published nearly simultaneously in Pain late last summer, by groups at the Universities of Colorado and Michigan, respectively. Somewhat surprisingly to the authors and others, in the Colorado study, which used both painful and nonpainful stimuli, the…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—An autoantibody to glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is associated with relapsing autoimmune meningoencephalomyelitis that is responsive to immunotherapy, researchers report. “Autoimmune GFAP meningoencephalomyelitis is the second autoimmune neurological disease in which the target of the immune attack is recognized to be the astrocyte type of brain cell,” Dr. Vanda A. Lennon…
The problem that dogs the work of all of those treating patients with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is the apparent lack of knowledge of the syndrome, both by the general public, as well as by swaths of the medical fraternity. Perhaps it was ever thus—a syndrome less than 40 years old could be described as new,…
The FDA is investigating the safety of MRIs using gadolinium-based contrast agents, which recent studies have shown may leave deposits of those chemicals in patients’ brain tissue after multiple scans…
Functional MRI scans that show how pain changes the brain could help rheumatologists develop better approaches to pain relief
Fever in rheumatology patients may present evidence of an inflammatory process
Research suggests weakened sensory cortex connectivity extending beyond the traditional somatosensory domain may contribute to pain associated with fibromyalgia
More than 80% of SLE patients experience some type of neurologic manifestation during their disease course. The challenge for rheumatologists and other clinicians lies in appropriately diagnosing any cognitive dysfunctions that accompany lupus and better understanding the causes and risk factors of those dysfunctions. “Cognitive Function in SLE” was the focus of a talk at the 2011 ACR/ARHP Annual Scientific Meeting in November.