All athletes—amateur and professional—should understand their risks for developing injury-related arthritis. Rheumatologists and other physicians at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York take a rapid approach to treating athletes, often considering intense physical therapy, innovative treatments and surgery much sooner than for the average patient—all to keep joints healthy and enable athletes to play for as long as possible…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Brain connectivity differences predict placebo responses in patients with chronic knee osteoarthritis, researchers report. Positive medical responses to placebo treatments are common, but the underlying central nervous system mechanisms remain unclear. Dr. Marwan N. Baliki and colleagues from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago used resting-state functional MRI…
Statins have anti-inflammatory/immunomodulatory effects that may be useful in preventing rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but previous observational studies about the risk of RA with statin use yielded conflicting results. In this large population-based study, high-intensity statin treatment was associated with a 23% reduced risk of RA when compared with low-intensity statin treatment. This is the largest study on the association of statins with RA risk to date, and the first to assess the effect of relative statin strength…
In a recent study, investigators examined the effects of both the short- and long-term use of selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on the development and loss of bone. The study results describe the mechanisms by which SSRIs, specifically fluoxetine, affect osteoclasts short term to increase bone mass, but also how the treatment may cause bone loss at six weeks in mice…
(Reuters Health)—Doctors might one day be able to harvest cells from patients’ noses to produce cartilage that can be transplanted into damaged knee joints, a small experiment suggests. Because the experiment only included 10 adults who were followed for just two years, it’s impossible to say for sure whether this procedure would be safe or…
Two sets of guidelines—one on managing anti-rheumatic drugs perioperatively for patients undergoing total hip and knee replacements, and another that updates glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis prevention and treatment strategies—will be featured in sessions at the 2016 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting this month. The Sessions Sunday, Nov. 13, 2:30–3:30 p.m.: Glucocorticoid-Induced Osteoporosis Prevention and Treatment: A New ACR Clinical…
To speed the development of tocilizumab to treat giant cell arteritis (GCA), the FDA designated it as a breakthrough therapy earlier this month…
Otulipenia is a recently discovered autoinflammatory disease caused by germline mutations, which results in dysregulated ubiquitination in patients. In a small-scale study, researchers used exome sequencing and candidate gene screening to identify three different loss-of-function mutations in the OTULIN/FAM105B gene in patients…
(Reuters Health)—People with type 1 diabetes often develop other autoimmune disorders, such as thyroid and gastrointestinal diseases, and a recent study yields new information about this link. In the study, 27% of patients with type 1 diabetes had at least one other autoimmune disorder. But the new study also held some surprises about how early…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Patients can develop rebound-associated vertebral fractures after stopping denosumab, a new report of nine cases shows. All of the patients were considered to be at low risk of fracture, and the fractures occurred within nine to 16 months of their last injection, Dr. Olivier Lamy and colleagues from Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland…