Reactive Arthritis News

One-quarter of Latin American patients with the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus continued to have joint pain 20 months following the initial infection, according to findings published in Arthritis and Rheumatology.

Sexual dysfunction and intimacy issues may rank high among the complaints reported by patients with rheumatic diseases, but these complaints often remain unaddressed in the clinical setting, for several reasons. Poor communication between physicians and patients is the most likely explanation, along with poor communication between patients and their partners. However, the reasons for this communication gap, which may range from stigma to time constraints in the clinic, are up for debate.

Precision medicine is rapidly racing forward and, for those of us who are watching, it may be reasonable to ask “What will this mean for me?” The most obvious question might be whether we should seek to be early adopters or lay low and wait for the dust to settle.

The NIH recently commissioned $55 million for studies to investigate precision medicine. While it remains to be seen how many of those dollars will be used in rheumatic diseases, the message is clear: Medicine is moving steadily toward personalized approaches.

Recently published results showed patients with rheumatoid arthritis were more likely to experience invasive group A streptococcal infection if they were prescribed medications that inhibited interleukin-1 beta.

Patients with cancer treated with ipilimumab or nivolumab alone or in combination with each other experienced a higher than normal risk of developing autoimmune joint and tissue diseases, according to results recently published in Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.

Recent research in JAMA Pediatrics determined that Clostridium difficile infection-associated reactive arthritis is underdiagnosed and often misdiagnosed among children.

The most highly accessed articles about pain management in rheumatology included a survey about NSAIDs. Other articles of interest highlighted fatigue associated with pain and issues related to fibromyalgia.

Modernizing medicine, Inc. announced the launch of its modmed Electronic Medical Assistant for pain medicine, a specialty-specific, cloud-based electronic health record system with tap and touch features providing access to an anatomic atlas.

NEW YORK CITY — Stephen I. Katz, MD, PhD, director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the NIH, presented the keynote speech at the Interdisciplinary Autoimmune Summit and urged rheumatologists, dermatologists, gastroenterologists and other health care professionals who treat patients with autoimmune diseases to work together. He also discussed the future work of NIH research into autoimmune diseases from a multidisciplinary approach.