Check out the first part of our Day 1 Podcast from ACR 2018 - LISTEN HERE

Monday afternoon's session on the treatment of Axial Spondyloarthritis presented us with a great selection of studies addressing important issues in modern treatment paradigm of AxSpA. Clinical and functional improvement with IL17 inhibitors in TNF naïve patients, incidence of IBD with IL17i, TNFi retention over time were amongst topics discussed.

Pegloticase has become an excellent option for management of patients with chronic refractory gout, although treatment may be limited by the development of anti-drug antibodies that lead to loss of serum urate (sUA) lowering effect.

While I’m only 7 years into a (hopefully) long career in the field of rheumatology, the pace at which we are seeing advances in new medications and earlier detection of rheumatoid arthritis requires you to continually refresh your approach to the disease.    We still haven’t displaced methotrexate and other conventional DMARDs, followed by TNF inhibitors for initial disease management.

We know that uveitis is an extra-articular manifestation of SpA but what remains unclear is if there are any factors that may play a role in the development of uveitis. One group sought to understand these issues.

RheumNow is in Chicago covering the ACR annual meeting. Here are the highlights from Sunday (day one). Be sure to check our complete coverage, including articles, video reports and tweets, at acr18.rheumnow.com.