A systematic and scoping literature examined the Treat-to-target (T2T) approach to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), noting its implementation is suboptimal and finding many barriers to implementation.

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study of 2021 has forecasted prevalence of gout to increase by 70% by 2050. In the USA, the prevalence of gout is estimated to be 10.3 million. As of 2020, 55.8 million people globally had gout, with a prevalence of 659.3 per 100 000 (this represents a 22.5% increase since 1990).

CARRA has developed consensus treatment plans for the use of biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) in patients with refractory, moderately severe juvenile dermatomyositis. Juvenile dermatomyositis is the most common form of idiopathic, inflammatory myositis in childhood, with an estimated incidence of 3.2 per million children per year in the United States.

Lancet Rheumatology has published a review of Calcium pyrophosphate deposition (CPPD) disease - a chronic inflammatory and degenerative crystal arthropathy that increases with aging.

The Annals of Internal Medicine reports that oral, low dose, weekly methotrexate significantly reduced knee osteoarthritis (KOA) pain, stiffness, and function in a randomized controlled trial.

A secondary analysis of the PEXIVAS study showed antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated vasculitis (AAV) patients complicated by diffuse alveolar hemorrhage (DAH) may have improved with plasma exchange and glucocorticoids, the results did not achieve significance. 

There are numerous impediments to diagnosis or referral; and a new study evaluates patient use of a mobile artificial intelligence (AI)–based symptom checker for diagnoses, but demonstrated only modest accuracy when applied to a cohort of patients with joint symptoms.

Medscape has published an overview to the 2024 updated recommendations for the treatment of systemic sclerosis (SSc) presented in Vienna at EULAR 2024 by Professor Francesco Del Galdo, MD, PhD on behalf of a 27 member task force.

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

Two prominent medical journals this week published new insights into the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), with both inidicating promient roles for T cells in what is a classically viewed as a humoral (B cell) disorder. 

Cartesian Therapeutics, has announced their first-in-class mRNA-engineered chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (mRNA CAR-T) therapy has been given to the first systematic lupus erythematosus (SLE). patient in a Phase 2 open-label clinical trial. 

In patients with clinically stable systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and lupus nephritis, the withdrawal of mycophenolate mofetil was not significantly inferior to mycophenolate maintenance, but MMF withdrawal had numerically more reactivations, while MMF maintenance had more infections.

EULAR has updated its treatment recommendations from the prior 2019 guidelines, since there have been several newly developed agents. The updated guidance includes 7 overarching principles and 11 recommendations regarding treatment strategy and pharmacological therapies.

Medscape has published an informative review of leflunomide, drawn from Dr. Eric Ruderman’s recent lecture on the subject at the February RWCS meeting in Maui. Here are some highpoints from this Medscape article and lecture.

An ultrasound study suggests that enthesitis is associated with both synovitis and tenosynovitis in patients with Psoriatic arthritis (PsA).