COVID-19 vaccination, treatments for rheumatic disease and more—the Late-Breaking Abstracts session of ACR Convergence 2021 highlighted six studies with implications for rheumatology.
In February A&R, Penso et al. reported on the results of their study, which explored whether patients with psoriasis, PsA and AS have a higher risk of developing IBD when treated with an IL-17 inhibitor compared with apremilast, a phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) inhibitor, or etanercept, a TNF inhibitor.
In January A&R, Simon et al. report a study to assess humoral and cellular immune responses after infection with, or vaccination against, SARS-CoV-2 in patients with B cell depletion and controls who are B cell competent, finding that B cell depletion completely blocks humoral but not T cell SARS-CoV-2 vaccination response. In the same issue, Connolly et al. evaluated disease flare and post-vaccination reactions in patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases following messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination.
A key question many graduating rheumatology fellows face each year is: Are you interested in pursuing a career in academic medicine or in private practice? Although the two tracks are not mutually exclusive, it is true that juggling the demands of scholarly work, medical education and a busy clinical workload is by no means easy….
Gendron et al. undertook this study to investigate the prevalence and prognostic value of conventional and nonconventional antiphospholipid antibodies in patients with COVID-19.
Bechman et al. set out to describe the frequency and predictors of nonserious infections and compare incidence rates across biologic DMARDs. They found all bDMARDs are associated with a greater risk of nonserious infection, with differences observed between agents. Although unmeasured confounding must be considered, the magnitude of effect is large.
Lee et al. examined the use of a smartphone application to monitor longitudinal electronic patient-reported outcomes on satisfaction and disease activity in patients with RA.
In their new study, Fike et al. found Latino patients with rheumatic diseases have a higher rate of COVID-19 than the general Latino population. Obesity is a risk factor for COVID-19, and COVID-19 is a risk factor for rheumatic disease flare.
In a study of patients with systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (ARDs) and matched comparators with COVID-19 but without systemic ARDs, D’Silva et al. found COVID-19 patients with systemic ARDs may be at a higher risk of hospitalization, ICU admission and more than matched comparators.