A matched cohort study from the Veterans Health Administration shows that rheumatoid arthritis patients have a >50% increased risk of lung cancer, and a 3-fold higher risk of lung cancer in RA-interstitial lung disease (ILD).

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news and journal reports from RheumNow.com this week.

A new scientific review of 148 studies enrolling over 4.3 million adult chronic pain patients treated with prescription opioid painkillers has found that nearly one in ten patients experiences opioid dependence or opioid use disorder and nearly one in three shows symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder.

Maksymowych and colleagues have shown that screening patients with either psoriasis, iritis, or colitis may yield a surprising percentage meeting ASAS criterial for axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA).

Real-world, retrospective study of microscopic-polyangiitis (ΜPA) and granulomatosis-with-polyangiitis (GPA) patients shows that rituximab (RTX) maintenance was associated with 25% risk of relapse and that lower relapse rates was seen with RTX plus cyclophosphamide treatment.

Data from a major federal survey indicate that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) don't pay massively more for healthcare than other folks, nor is their risk for functional deficits tremendously greater, researchers found.

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.

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news and journal reports from this past week on RheumNow.com - leading with lupus because everyone wants to know about lupus!

JAMA reports that following the COVID-19 pandemic US adults trust in physicians and hospitals decreased, and was associated with lower odds of COVID vaccination.

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

Osteoarthritis affects 600 million people worldwide, making it a leading cause of disability.

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.

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have identified a potential treatment for the respiratory symptoms of long COVID after discovering an unknown cause of the condition inside the lungs.

The inflammatory activity in the body caused by rheumatoid arthritis is linked to specific cognitive impairments, finds a small comparative study, published in the open access journal RMD Open.