Wondering how best to care for an adult patient with juvenile idiopathic arthritis-associated uveitis or a pediatric patient with early-onset osteoarthritis? Unsure how to manage a 23-year-old with chronic nonbacterial osteomyelitis or an 8-year-old with tophaceous gout due to Lesch-Nyhan syndrome? Ask a Med-Peds rheumatologist. What Is a Med-Peds Rheumatologist? Med-Peds rheumatologists in the U.S….
A school science project demonstrates that flipbooks can be a useful educational tool for patients and their families to learn about rheumatic conditions and their treatment.
SAN DIEGO—As part of a Nov. 14 session on lupus nephritis at ACR Convergence 2023, Simone Appenzeller, MD, PhD, shared perspectives on the importance of biopsy to inform its diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, with an emphasis on childhood disease. Prompt diagnosis and treatment of lupus nephritis is perhaps even more important for children than for…
In 2022, an international group of researchers reported the seminal finding that a gain-of-function variant of a single-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) sensor, known as toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7), can cause human systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).1 The paper in Nature showed that a newly described variant of TLR7, identified in a child with severe lupus, was…
Frailty & Prefrailty in Patients with RA TNF-α inhibitors associated with higher infection risk By Namrata Singh, MD, MSCI, Katherine D. Wysham, MD, James S. Andrews, MD, & Una E. Makris, MD Why was this study done? Frailty and prefrailty are more common and occur at a younger age in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)…
Solomon et al. examined whether a mobile application (app) for patients with rheumatoid arthritis integrated in the electronic health record would be used by patients and rheumatologists.
Checking blood levels of commonly used disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) has gained widespread attention in the rheumatology community, even resulting in a recent guidance document from EULAR for biologics.1 Although a highly useful tool, drug level measurement in rheumatology is not without challenges; many of our drugs violate the basic principles of pharmacology that we…
Patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) often face many concerns, fears and uncertainties that render “treatment decision making very difficult,” says Jasvinder Singh, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Often these patients, who tend to be women from minority groups, “do not have access to easily understandable…
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, confusion and concern for immunosuppressed patients grew among rheumatologists and patients alike. Research has helped bridge the knowledge gap, and treatment options for COVID-19 have helped ease concerns.
For individuals living with rheumatic disease, chronic pain can be one of the more difficult symptoms to manage—leaving individuals to search for therapies and medications to live a more comfortable life. Rheumatic diseases may be a cause of pain, some more acute or flare driven and others more chronic pain, or pain that lasts more…