Cognitive Function in Older Adults with Lupus Save

Hello. My name is Rinalini Day. I am a rheumatology fellow from King's College London in The UK. And today, I am going to be talking about one of the posters that were presented at EULAR this year. It's POS seven thirty, and the title of this abstract is self reported cognitive function in among older adults with systemic lupus erythematosus compared to other rheumatic and musculoskeletal conditions.

Now, this one caught my eye because I think it's fair to say as clinicians, I think we're pretty poor in our lupus patients asking about cognitive symptoms, by which I mean, for example, forgetfulness, brain fog, as well as wider neuropsychiatric symptoms as well. And I think we sort of neglect these symptoms in general when speaking to all of our patients with RMDs. So, the aim of this particular study was to look at self reported cognitive function among an older cohort of individuals with SLE, as compared to conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia of similar ages. So, this data actually comes from the large forward registry, which is based in The United States, and the cognitive symptoms were assessed using validated measures, And then the symptoms were compared between people with SLE and the people with the other diseases that I mentioned. And actually, the authors concluded that cognitive symptoms were far worse among older individuals with SLE compared to individuals of a similar age with the other rheumatic diseases.

Furthermore And to that, the worst perceived cognitive function was then associated with worse self reported disease status. So, clearly, is having a much broader impact than simply a number on a page. The perceptions of cognitive function from the patient were also associated with less satisfaction with their health, for example, even after the disease was dealt to be controlled. So, the reason this was quite a fascinating poster for me was that I definitely will be making sure that I try and ask about these symptoms much more in the future. And it just shows how much further we need to go in not only trying to pick these symptoms up in clinic, but also the research gap that's there, to see what we can do to try and reduce this huge cognitive burden in our patients with lupus.

If you'd like to know more about that particular abstract, you can check out the abstract in the ULA repository or look at the poster. And do go to roomnow.com to find out the latest news coming from Vienna and EULA twenty twenty four. Thank you.