It was a banner week at the FDA; a new drug approval you should know about; a lot of information about pregnancy and safety; and an interesting case plus a question from one of our readers submitted via Back Talk. This and more in this week's podcast. Let's dive in.

Post-vaccination disease flares were uncommon among patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases who were inoculated against COVID-19, researchers found.

How much psoriasis do you need to have in order to have psoriatic arthritis? This plus a review of rheumatology and COVID news from the past week on RheumNow.com.

Registry data suggests an increased risk of herpes zoster (HZ, shingles) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients taking JAK inhibitors (JAKi) but also with other biologic DMARDs, compared to csDMARDs.

Medscape has published the annual U.S.

Sparks and colleagues have published data from the Global Rheumatology Alliance noting that among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients afflicted with COVID-19 infection, there was little influence of their baseline biologic or targeted synthetic (b/ts) disease-modifying antirheumatic drug

Deodhar and colleagues have published the results of a study showing that in adult patients with active ankylosing spondylitis (AS), oral tofacitinib was effective (versus placebo) and is safe. 

Patients with inflammatory/autoimmune diseases who initiated treatment with interleukin (IL)-17 inhibitors did not have a higher risk for the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but only after taking into account the severity of their underlying disease, French investigators reported

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

A study of first-degree relatives (FDRs) of HLA-B27-positive axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) patients shows clinical or imaging features of spondyloarthritis in up to 32% subjects, regardless of HLA-B27 status.

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

2020 was historic, memorable and game-changing. Under the cloud of COVID-19, there were many significant and memorable advances and setbacks for the rheumatology world. In our accounting of most read articles for 2020, (not surprisingly) 17/20 were COVID-related.

Pfizer announced results Wednesday from its FDA-mandated postmarketing safety study of tofacitinib (Xeljanz), and they don't bode well for the drug and possibly others in its class.