Hooked on Rheum with Jinoos Yazdany, MD, MPH
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Rheumatology has been a lifelong love for me. When I was a small child, my parents were working and asked my aunt to care for me during the day. My aunt did not have kids of her own and showered me with love and attention. But I also watched her struggle with rheumatoid arthritis, which progressively made it harder for her to do her activities of daily living.
Treatment options were limited back then. Watching her suffer with RA left a deep impression on me. As I grew up, I watched her become progressively more disabled, develop compression fractures from steroids and ultimately succumb to a stroke, likely from years of uncontrolled inflammatory disease.
With my aunt in mind, my interest in rheumatology grew during medical school. During an away rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital, I had the opportunity to watch the rheumatology faculty – master diagnosticians and wonderful teachers – at work. I loved how deeply rheumatologists thought about patients, how they performed careful physical exams and how they were all so excited that we were on the dawn of a new therapeutic era. Leflunomide had just been approved, biologics were just around the corner and there was so much hope in the specialty.
Later during residency, I became interested in public health and epidemiology. I wondered if I could marry these interests with rheumatology. At that time, investigators at the University of California, San Francisco, and around the country were increasingly thinking about the impact of rheumatic disease through a public health lens. Studies on the impact of rheumatic disease on a patient’s health-related quality of life, work life and longevity were increasing, and there were novel investigations examining environmental triggers of rheumatic disease, like smoking. I found this research fascinating and have been so fortunate to pursue epidemiologic research in rheumatology over the last decade at UCSF.
I have been so lucky to pursue a career that allows me to blend my love of clinical rheumatology and my research interests. I often think about how far we have come as a specialty and how patients like my aunt can now expect to live fuller, healthier lives. It is a privilege and an honor to practice rheumatology, and I would choose the specialty again if I had to do it all over!
Jinoos Yazdany, MD, MPH Vice-chair Real-world data infrastructure, registry and IRB/Ethics Global Rheumatology Alliance Chief, Division of rheumatology Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital