VIDEO: Collaborative care ‘cornerstone’ of vasculitis management

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So collaborative care is really the cornerstone of how we manage all vasculitis patients, but especially vasculitis patients who become pregnant or who desire pregnancy. And that really starts even before pregnancy, as we said, with really good control of disease. We want to do a lot of preconception counseling on what pregnancy might look like, what risks those patients might face, and having them meet well before they start trying for pregnancy with our maternal fetal medicine specialists, with their high-risk OB physicians.

And so having them counsel them in addition to us as rheumatologists on what the medications would look like, what medications are safe, what the risks associated with a flare during pregnancy would look like, what the potential delivery situation could look like if they experience any of these adverse outcomes of pregnancy. So collaborative care is critically important. In addition to our obstetrics colleagues, we also work super closely with all of our other subspecialists that help manage vasculitis with us. As blood vessels exist in every organ system in the body, vasculitis can and does affect every organ system in the body. So, we work very closely with our nephrologists, our neurology colleagues, our cardiology colleagues, everybody who vasculitis touches, which is genuinely every type of medicine. And so, I feel very privileged to have a number of colleagues in all of these different departments that have these specific interests, both in vasculitis and in reproductive outcomes associated with it.