Behcet's disease is difficult to manage, especially if the goal is to avoid corticosteroids.

Defects in protein citrullination and its consequences in patients with RA have been studied widely in the recent decade. It appears that autoantibodies, including those against citrullinated proteins, are of diagnostic and prognostic relevance.

Common cardiac biomarkers could be used to identify patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) at risk for developing pulmonary hypertension, French researchers reported.

Increased sodium intake has been shown to increase Th17 cell activity, and in animal models high-salt diets have been shown to drive IL-23-dependent TH17 cells to cause experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (citation source (http://url.ie/z238). I

Transforming growth factor (TGF-β) is known to have potent profibrotic activity and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis a futile condition with no effective disease modifying treatments.

Currently there are no FDA-approved medications for the treatment of digital ulcerations in the United States.  Digital ulcers are a common, unfortunate and difficult to manage consequence of the vascular obliteration and fibrosis that accompanies systemic sclerosis.

Using Medicaid data from 2000-2006, 9,600 hydroxychloroquine new users were compared to 3,829 new users of immunosuppressive agents (IS) in patients with SLE. They assessed adherence using the MPR - the medication possession ratio.

A retrospective review of 1285 US male veterans showed the prevalence of inflammatory eye disease to be 2%. Uveitis was most common (most being anterior uveitis), followed by keratitis, scleritis, episcleritis, and acute ischemic optic neuropathy.

An incident cohort study from Denmark showed that 84 SLE pregnancies resulted in 62 live births.  Lupus disease activity strongly influenced maternal complications seen in half and fetal complications were observed in one-third of cases.

These abstracts and presentations were presented last week on the 12th and 13th of June at the EULAR 2015 annual meeting in Rome.

Varicella-zoster virus infection was studied in temporal artery biopsies from those suspected of having giant cell arteritis.

These abstracts and presentations were presented 12 June at the EULAR 2015 annual meeting.

EULAR 2015 started the afternoon of Wednesday June 10th.

A Danish nationwide healthcare registry was used to identify newly diagnosed alcoholic cirrhosis patients between 1977 and 2010. A matched cohort analysis compared each patient with five random individuals from the population.

The diagnosis of chronic lung disease in patients with systemic sclerosis may be difficult because of atypical symptoms, variable evolution and limitations of current classification criteria for a definite diagnosis. Nevertheless, diagnosis is necessary as patients with SSc-ILD have a p

A prospective study of sildenafil was conducted in 25 centers that included 83 patients and 192 digital ulcers at entry. The odds of healing ulcers was less, but not significant, for sildenafil.

Fibromyalgia is a noninflammatory disorder. However, there are patients with prolonged morning stiffness, subjective joint swelling and many with modest-to-moderate elevations of acute-phase reactants.

The population prevalence of Sjogrens syndrome is  0.2%, with an incidence of 4 cases per 100,000 per year.  Sjogrens is 20 times more common in females than males.