The Congress of Clinical Rheumatology-West goes ‘Back to the Future’ in San Diego
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Highlights of the upcoming 2023 Congress of Clinical Rheumatology-West include a talk on what the rheumatology field will look like in a decade, according to David A. McLain, MD, symposium director for the meeting.
Delivered by John J. Cush, MD, executive editor of RheumNow, the featured Saturday night banquet session will be dubbed, “Back to the Future: What Rheumatology Will Look Like in 10 Years.”
Cush will also cover the year in review for rheumatology, which McLain noted is always a popular program for CCR-West attendees.
CCR-West will run from Sept. 7 to Sept. 10 in San Diego, with a hybrid live and virtual format. This will be the 39th year of the program.
Currently, 300-plus registrants are set to travel to southern California for the meeting, with more than 100 virtual attendees registered.
“It is not quite as big as the Destin meeting, but the CCR-West numbers are growing,” McLain, who is executive director of the Alabama Society for the Rheumatic Diseases, told Healio.
This will be the second year the congress is being held at the Marriott Marquis & Marina. Attendees should grow more comfortable with the location, which is right across the street from the city’s famed Gaslamp district.
“We are in a better space in the hotel than we were in last year,” McLain said. “They were impressed with what we did, so we have their grand ballroom.”
The meeting will begin with the fellows’ poster rounding.
“There will be 78 abstracts from 62 fellows and prospective fellows from all over the country, as well as places as far as Cairo, Egypt,” McLain said. “It is a great way for the fellows and attendees to get together and meet each other. The faculty will round with them, and it is a great experience for everyone.”
The meeting will also feature an immunology boot camp, which will be run by Leonard Calabrese, DO, of the Cleveland Clinic, Alan Epstein, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip J. Mease, MD, of the University of Washington and Swedish Medical Center, in Seattle.
“We are doing the boot camps at both CCR-East and -West now,” McLain said. “There are a lot of people registered. It should really be excellent.”
Looking closely at the clinical program, half of the 16 faculty presenters will be women, according to McLain.
“We, of course, have adult rheumatologists, a pediatric rheumatologist, and also a dermatologist, pain management specialist, and an endocrinologist” he said.
Jeffrey A. Sparks, MD, of Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will be addressing difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis.
“He will also cover biologics and targeted synthetic DMARDs,” McLain said. “Does it matter what we select?”
Elizabeth Volkmann, MD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, is set to cover another challenging clinical topic — scleroderma. Meanwhile, hard-to-treat dermatology cases will be discussed by Ruth Ann Vleugels, MD, MPH, also of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Yet another expert from Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Karen Costenbader, MD, MPH, is on the agenda to address preclinical autoimmunity, according to McLain.
“She will discuss which patients are likely to go on to develop lupus,” he said. “I don’t think I have heard that talk anywhere else.”
Yvonne C. Lee, MD, of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, is set to address the topic of pain mechanisms in rheumatic disease.
“She has done a lot of research on this, and we have not really covered it before,” McLain said.
Also on the topic of pain, Stephen Ziegler, PhD, JD, of Portland, Oregon, will cover the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case Ruan v. United States, in which the court ruled unanimously in favor of two doctors who faced criminal charges for overprescribing pain medications.
“He will also discuss psilocybin and cannabis use in pain,” McLain said. “They should be interesting talks.”
Beyond the aforementioned programs, psoriatic arthritis, vasculitis, osteoarthritis, connective tissue diseases, myopathy and biomarkers will be discussed.
Epstein will once again run the thieves’ market, another popular item of the CCR agenda, McLain said. In addition, there will be rounds with faculty featuring Costenbader, Epstein, Volkmann and others.
“The product theaters even have renowned rheumatology speakers,” McLain said, noting that Alvin F. Wells, MD, of Aurora Health Care, based in Wisconsin, M. Elaine Husni, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, W. Winn Chatham, MD, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, John R. P. Tesser, MD, of Arizona Arthritis and Rheumatology, and Daniel Wallace, MD, of UCLA, are set to present.
McLain said he hopes attendees will have adjusted to the new location and find time explore the Gaslamp, the marina and other sites in downtown San Diego.
“We are happy to be back here once again in beautiful San Diego and its weather,” he said.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts