Dr. Glaucomflecken, updates on PsA slated for Congress of Clinical Rheumatology-West 2022
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The Congress of Clinical Rheumatology-West will be held in a different venue in San Diego this year, but that should have no impact on the quality of the program.
CCR-West will run from Oct. 20 to 23 in San Diego, with a hybrid live and virtual format. The Congress has been running for 37 years strong and will include more than 600 attendees from at least 45 states and 11 countries.
The usual site of the meeting — San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado — is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation. However, that has not stopped CCR-West from convening, this time at the Marriott Marquis & Marina, also in San Diego.
“We were just there last weekend, we went over the whole site, including where the main lectures will be held, the exhibit hall and other sites,” David A. McLain, MD, executive director of the Alabama Society for the Rheumatic Diseases and symposium director of the Congress of Clinical Rheumatology, told Healio. “It is a beautiful facility and a great location.”
McLain highlighted the hotel’s proximity to the Gaslamp Quarter, a lively downtown hotspot, known for its restaurants and bars. “It is basically right across the street,” he said.
Although this year’s meeting will not feature a beach right out the back door of the hotel, McLain urged all attendees to enjoy all that San Diego has to offer. “It’s a different location, but it is still going to be a great meeting,” he said.
Turning to the program, Elaine Husni, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, will give an update on psoriatic arthritis, while Richard Furie, MD, of Northwell Health, will discuss the latest treatments for lupus.
“He is a big lupus expert,” McLain said. “He will talk about the latest drugs and how they fit into current treatment paradigms.”
In addition, Furie will return later in the program to discuss antiphospholipid syndrome, McLain added.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Warrington, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, will talk about ANCA vasculitis and its biomarkers. “He will also give a general vasculitis update,” McLain said.
Noa Schwartz, MD, MS, of Albert Einstein Medical College, is set to discuss cognitive dysfunction in the rheumatic diseases, according to McLain. “She is an amazing speaker,” he said.
The topic of the rheumatologist’s role in COVID-19 will be handled by Leonard Calabrese, DO, professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, the RJ Fasenmyer chair of clinical immunology at the Cleveland Clinic, and chief medical editor of Healio Rheumatology.
“A lot has evolved with post-acute COVID syndromes,” McLain said. “This should be an incredibly interesting talk.”
Atul Deodhar, MD, of the Oregon Health & Science University, will be on hand to discuss the spondyloarthropathies. “He is on a number of peer-reviewed papers on ankylosing spondylitis and spondyloarthritis,” McLain said.
Thomas Lloyd, MD, PhD, of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, in Baltimore, is set to give two talks. One will cover inclusion body myositis and the other will detail the use of autoantibodies in understanding myopathy and myositis.
Sonja Bartolome, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, will cover the topic of pulmonary arterial hypertension, according to McLain.
“She will tell us how to recognize pulmonary arterial hypertension in our patients with connective tissue disease,” he said. “You just do not want to miss PAH, because there are treatments available for it.”
Veteran CCR-West speaker Elizabeth Volkmann, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles, is slated to give two presentations, first discussing systemic sclerosis before shifting to interstitial lung disease. Her second talk will immediately follow Bartolome’s presentation on pulmonary hypertension.
“Those talks should go together well,” McLain said. “She is an excellent speaker.”
The topic of skin manifestations in the rheumatic diseases will be covered by Joseph Merola, MD, MMSc, of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, in Boston, while Edward Michael Lewiecki, MD, of Albuquerque, is set to cover the topic of when osteopenia becomes osteoporosis.
“Lewiecki’s second talk will be on the sequence of therapies for osteoporosis,” McLain said. “The order does matter.”
Kevin Zacharoff, MD, of SUNY Stony Brook University, in New York, is scheduled to cover the topic of pain management. “A lot of us need to cover the topic of pain management to renew our license,” McLain said. “The first talk will address chronic pain, and the second will be about navigating regulatory waters in pain management.”
Devyani Misra, MB, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, will be on hand to address geriatric rheumatology. “She will cover a number of diseases and the dosing of drugs, and how these factors are different in older populations,” McLain said.
Meanwhile, the CCR-West banquet, scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 22, will feature as its speaker William E. Flanary, MD, an ophthalmologist and comedian from Portland, Oregon, who is better known by his 3 million followers on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter as Dr. Glaucomflecken.
“Dr. Glaucomflecken is his online presence, an extremely funny character he has created,” McLain said. “Mattie Feldman, MD, said that he is so good that she may come to the meeting just because he is speaking.”
CCR-West 2022 will also once again feature a thieves market run by Alan Epstein, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Fellows present interesting cases, and we try to guess what is going on,” McLain said. “It is a great way to go over diseases that are not common enough to warrant a whole session but are still relevant for rheumatologists in the clinic.”
Epstein will additionally be joined by Calabrese and Husni to run the immunology course. There will also be a poster session devoted to the fellows.
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