WASHINGTON, D.C.—For patients with osteoarthritis and other age-related musculoskeletal diseases, treatment with mesenchymal stem cells may soon offer a potent way to slow and repair degenerative signs of disease. This is the goal, a goal that is moving from the laboratory to the clinic as results from ongoing randomized clinical trials show the safety and…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—From diagnosis questions to infection risk to treatment decisions, handling giant cell arteritis (GCA) and polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) comes with a range of challenges for clinicians. Speaking in the ACR Review Course at the 2016 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting, an expert—Rebecca Manno, MD, MHS, assistant professor of medicine in rheumatology at Johns Hopkins, as well…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—A 70-year-old woman had been diagnosed with rotator cuff disease three years earlier and received an array of treatments. What she hadn’t received was an X-ray. She’d had an MRI, and her doctor—not an orthopedist or a rheumatologist, but a primary care physician—had zeroed in on degenerative changes in her rotator cuff. The problem,…
(Reuters Health)—Arthritis that accompanies the skin condition psoriasis may also come with a higher risk of heart problems, according to a Hong Kong study. In particular, patients with psoriatic arthritis may have a three- to four-fold higher prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis. Clinicians need to identify patients with high cardiovascular (CV) risk so they can provide…
Corticosteroids still represent the mainstay of treatment of patients with active disease. They have been used for more than 60 years, and although prolonged use is associated with organ damage, they have been shown to be lifesaving in various phases of the history of the disease. History of Use First introduced in the late 1960s…
Patients experience fevers for many reasons, but can they help physicians diagnose disease? Using modern technology and social media, Jonathan S. Hausmann, MD, is working to further the understanding of body temperatures…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Secukinumab appears to improve clinical and radiographic outcomes of ankylosing spondylitis (AS) through two years of therapy, according to new results from the MEASURE 1 study. Secukinumab is a fully human monoclonal antibody against interleukin-17A, which is implicated in various pathophysiological features of spondyloarthritis. In a report online Dec. 13 in the…
Two previously unidentified cellular players in the pathogenesis of primary Sjogren’s syndrome (pSS) have been discovered: a regulatory T cell (Prdm1+eTreg) and a helper T cell (Il21+Th1). In the study, researchers also identified the transcriptional signatures of these cells and their differential dependency on the lymphotoxin/LIGHT signaling axis, which may guide future therapeutic interventions…
The makers of FX006, a steroid injection for treating pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis, have submitted a new drug application to the FDA…
Health coaching by telephone is increasingly being used to assist in chronic disease self-management. A recent study examined the benefits of simultaneous health coaching via telephone as an addition to a physiotherapist-prescribed home-based physical activity program for patients with knee OA. Although participants receiving additional coaching had a short-term improvement in adherence, changes in pain and function did not differ between the study’s groups at six months…