Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news and journal articles from this past week on RheumNow.com.

The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) today thanked lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives for introducing the bipartisan Provider Reimbursement Stability Act of 2025 (H.R. 8163), legislation designed to stabilize Medicare payments for physicians and protect patient access to care.

A 2026 Physician Survey to assess artificial intelligence and its use in Medical Practice has been published and follows earlier surveys around adoption and use. This is the third in a series of longitudinal surveys (prior waves 2023, 2024), enabling meaningful trend analysis. AI adoption has more than doubled in three years and physician sentiment shifting decisively toward cautious optimism.

Documenting a patient visit in the electronic health record (EHR) is essential to healthcare delivery, but also a major contributor to clinician burnout.

An Italian retrospective study of 411 idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM) patients applied IMACS criteria to assess the risk of cancer and found significantly more cancers in those at high risk.

The number of U.S. patients prescribed long-term opioid therapy declined from 2015 to 2023, but co-prescribing of opioids with gabapentinoids increased, prescription data showed.

In 2024, the Canadian Rheumatology Association (CMA) and the Spondyloarthritis Research Consortium of Canada (SPARCC) published a comprehensive set of 56 treatment recommendations for the management of axial spondyloarthritis. This first update is focused on the reassessment of IL-17i recommendations.

A randomized clinical trial of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) in fibromyalgia showed meaningful improvement in pain for 6 months when combined with physical therapy (PT). 

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the journal reports and news from RheumNow.com.  This week we discuss moral distress, FM in PsA, Lyme Vax is back & hidden but tangible benefits of the MDHAQ.

Drs. Dejaco and Matteson have published and update and review of polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) in the NEJM. They lay out the initial approach to diagnosis, initial steroid dosing, management over time and when to use steroid sparing therapy.

Medicare coverage of targeted disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) -- both under Medicare Advantage and in separate Part D plans -- is likely to leave many patients wanting, researchers found.

European nations may be winning at optimizing care for people with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), international survey data indicate. In data collected from physicians and patients in the U.S. and five European countries, American patients reported a greater symptom burden on average after treatment had begun, and they agreed less often with their physicians regarding satisfaction with therapy.

EULAR has updated its recommendations for the management of Behçet’s syndrome, the last being published in 2018. The current update carries no recommendations from the previous version: seven recommendations have content modifications, four have minor wording amends, and one is entirely new.

The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) has updated their rheumatoid arthritis (RA) management recommendations, notably with fewer recommendations (total of 9, down from 11 in 2022 version), by merging and removing previous recommendations.