Rheumatology

Birth control guidance provided to women taking rheumatoid arthritis therapies is lacking, and other rheumatology news reported across MJH Life Sciences™.

Ultrasounds and MRI are both used to monitor inflammation activity in rheumatoid arthritis, but their value in refining future treatment strategies has so far been unknown.

Some of the latest rheumatology news includes updates on pregnancy, exercise, and treatment for psoriatic arthritis.

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) patients face a greater risk of mortality, but treatment with tumor necrosis factor inhibitors erases it.

Using acitretin in combination with secukinumab resulted in nearly complete or total relief for 3 patients with severe psoriasis, according to a case study.

About 90% of patients are diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in an outpatient setting, while the 10% diagnosed in an emergency department or as inpatients incur significantly higher health care costs.

A proportion of rheumatoid arthritis pain may be more appropriately considered separate from inflammation and should be treated as a focus of its own.

Guidelines on the use of biologic drugs in patients with psoriasis were mostly seen as having medium-to-high quality; however, investigators said that more work needs to be done to ensure applicability to clinical practice.

Adalimumab was the most commonly used tumor necrosis factor-alpha inhibitor (TNFi), accounting for 47% of 90,000 incidences of TNFi use. Rituximab was the most commonly used non-TNFi, for 44% of 70,000 incidences of non-TNFi use.

Researchers did not find an association in people who had gout.

The risk for patients with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance developing multiple myeloma is double if they have a specific category of rheumatic diseases compared with those without the diseases.

COVID-19 led many patients to change their use of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs in the pandemic’s initial months, with or without physician guidance.

Behçet disease (BD), a rare systemic inflammatory disease, is associated with multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

In patients with chronic inflammatory rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMD), the presence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) indicates an increased risk of cancer.

The bipartisan bill spells out 5 step therapy exemptions for patients by amending the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

As the first quarter of 2021 ends, patients choosing to keep using secukinumab may be offered an inducement to switch to another biologic, ixekizumab.

There is a lack of standards for diagnosing and treating nail psoriasis, a situation needing attention because the condition is often a precursor to psoriatic arthritis.

Five biologics used in the treatment of adult patients with plaque psoriasis have been found to improve health-related quality of life.

More real-world evidence is needed to determine what role a score of 100 on the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) might have in daily clinical practice, according to a recent review.

Elderly onset rheumatoid arthritis (RA) can be brought under control with a lower methotrexate (MTX) dosage than that required for young-onset disease.

A recent study found that patients living in an an area with low socioeconomic status were less likely to be prescribed biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs if they were considered low-income and were male and African American.

From 1999 to 2015, permanent disability claims for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) spiked during periods of economic recessions, suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic may create a similar effect in the near future.

The novel systemic-immune inflammation index (SII) can be used to predict the onset of psoriasis.

Multimorbidity affects 1 in 4 US adults and leads to increased health care use and lower quality of life.

The results from an analysis of patients from 12 rheumatology centers treated with secukinumab for psoriatic arthritis were in line with earlier pivotal trials, the researchers said.