Audio Highlights and Interviews from Day 2 at the ACR 2018 meeting - LISTEN HERE

Monday was a packed day of sessions and studies. Here are our just a few of our highlights.

Audio Highlights and Interviews from Day 1 at the ACR 2018 meeting - LISTEN HERE

Audio Highlights and Interviews from Day 2 at the ACR 2018 meeting - LISTEN HERE

Four years ago, the genesis of this session (technology tools for rheumatologists) was from the frustration of the archaic technologies we have been using in our medical practices (including user hostile EHRs), compared to the rapid advancing pace of the consumer technologies we use at home. So came the struggle to adapt affordable and usable consumer technology products in the office that would save time (or at least be time neutral) and impact

Dr. Joseph Smolen delivered one of the most elegant and informative talk on rheumatoid arthritis at this ACR’s meeting as a tribute to Dr. Paul Klemperer. Dr. Smolen led us on a journey, and had us feeling content with what we are doing in practice as we walked with him from historical discoveries of RA through new drug development. Then Dr. Smolen did the unthinkable: he made us crash!

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.

During a fascinating gout session on October 21, Hyon Choi presented an important paper (abstract 874) which used data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study to try to understand the rapid increase in the incidence of gout in recent decades.

During medical training, we were taught about rare diseases that are unlikely to be encountered, but there is a reason why our professors even mention these diseases. It is not just for our board exams; the lectures are for us to recognize the features of the disease when the rare patient comes across our exam table.

We are diving head first into flu season and we need to prepare ourselves. Last year we now know that 80,000 Americans died from influenza. I was happy to see the abstract presented in today’s plenary session by Colmegna et al about efficacy of high dose influenza vaccine in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (#837). This study was a randomized, modified double-blind, active-controlled trial carried out in adults with RA.