PHILADELPHIA—Ever since the seminal work of C. Lockard Conley, MD, in 1952 of the discovery of the lupus anticoagulant, antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) has been of great interest to rheumatologists, hematologists and many others. At ACR Convergence 2022, the session titled Draft ACR/EULAR Antiphospholipid Syndrome Classification Criteria sought to summarize the rigorous process that went into…
How does a rheumatologist treat a pregnant woman when many medications are not approved for pregnancy or safety data are limited?
PHILADELPHIA—At ACR Convergence 2022, the much-anticipated ACR Review Course featured talks from eight experts. Topics reflected the heterogeneity of our field and included Sjögren’s disease, spondyloarthritis (SpA), osteoarthritis (OA), paraneoplastic rheumatic syndromes, metabolic bone disease, statin myopathy, Raynaud’s phenomenon and autoinflammatory syndrome. Here, I share highlights from this comprehensive, six-hour session. Sjögren’s Disease Sara S….
An ACR Convergence 2022 session provided practical updates on ways to best protect pediatric & adult patients with rheumatic disease from COVID-19.
At ACR Convergence 2022, three women with rheumatic diseases discuss the profound life changes that the diseases wrought and ways they’ve found to cope.
PHILADELPHIA—Amy Gietzen started feeling the pain when she was 19. Her forearms, elbows, wrists and fingers were constantly swollen and sensitive. Six months later, she saw a doctor and was diagnosed with systemic diffuse scleroderma—a particularly hard-to-manage rheumatic disease with wide-ranging effects. Ms. Gietzen, who spoke at ACR Convergence 2022 and is a public speaker,…
In November, the CMS finalized 12 MIPS Value Pathways (MVP) in the Quality Payment Program, including a rheumatology MVP. In 2023, clinicians can opt to report via traditional MIPS, the rheumatology MVP or both.
The Plenary III Session reviewed the results of the SAPHYR trial of sarilumab in PMR patients, as well as the WE-CAN study on the impact of a community-level diet & exercise program on knee pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis.
In medicine, as in advertising, pictures can be worth a thousand words. From arthritis to vasculitis, imaging studies have been variably employed to aid in the diagnosis, treatment, risk stratification and prognostication of patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal disorders. The same holds true with the idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM), in which the clinical utility is…
The study of rheumatology (and medicine) in art, history, literature and music is engaging and informative.1-12 In this article, we present some instances when rheumatic and autoimmune diseases in certain individuals may have affected the course of history in Western civilization. Physicians are usually concerned, appropriately, with the effects of illness on the lives of…