Drug-naive, new-onset SLE patients, even those with inactive disease, are likely to have silent cardiac impairment, according to a new study by Guo et al. Cardiac involvement is the leading cause of death in patients with lupus, and the estimates of cardiac impairment in SLE range from 31–70%. Cardiac impairment can remain unrecognized until after autopsy. These researchers investigated the use of cardiac MRI to explore early warning signs of silent cardiac involvement in SLE and determine treatment timing…
Bone Marrow Edema Studied for Spondyloarthritis Diagnostic Insights
Researchers in Demark studied joints of young adult athletes to better understand the difference in bone marrow edema common in healthy people vs. what is experienced by patients with spondyloarthritis, a serious inflammatory condition of the spine and sacroiliac joints. Early recognition of spondylo-arthritis can be tricky because it can be confused with symptoms and…
Getting Past the Noise to Identify SpA
Objective: Low-grade bone marrow edema (BME) has been reported in the sacroiliac (SI) joints of 25% of healthy individuals and patients with nonspecific mechanical back pain, thus challenging the specificity and predictive value of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the identification of early spondyloarthritis (SpA). It is unknown whether stress injury in competition sports may…
Lateral Hip Pain: Could It Be Gluteal Tendinopathy?
Researchers recently found that physical tests that involve an active muscle contraction were most useful in identifying gluteal tendinopathy in patients with lateral hip pain. However, patients who were not palpably tender over the greater trochanter were unlikely to have GT detected during an MRI…
Tofacitinib Decreases Inflammation in Early RA
A recent study used MRI to show that tofacitinib reduces inflammation and inhibition of the progression of structural damage in adults with early RA…
FDA Investigates MRI Safety after Studies Find GBCA Deposits in Brain
The FDA is investigating the safety of MRIs using gadolinium-based contrast agents, which recent studies have shown may leave deposits of those chemicals in patients’ brain tissue after multiple scans…
Envision Arthritis Pathology
MRI advances in RA and OA