Lisa Rapaport |
It’s no secret to any health professional, including rheumatologists, that smoking cigarettes or using other tobacco-based products is unhealthy. Yet how does smoking specifically affect rheumatic diseases, and what are some of the newest findings in this area? What role do e-cigarettes have in the smoking risk landscape? Those are the sorts of questions asked…
How tobacco companies tapped physicians to bolster hollow marketing claims to sell cigarettes
Is rheumatoid arthritis (RA) preventable? Results of a newly published study suggest that personalized medicine approaches may result in health behavior that may reduce RA risk. “We have gotten to the point where we’ve identified some modifiable behaviors that affect rheumatoid arthritis risk,” says Jeffrey A. Sparks, MD, MMSc, assistant professor of medicine in the…
Obesity has an established systemic inflammatory component. Could that be a trigger for the inflammation seen in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other rheumatic diseases? Although there is no direct scientific evidence, both mechanistic and epidemiologic clues do give some intriguing suggestions of a possible link. “At first, we thought that fat was involved only in…