Articles By Jack Cush, MD
Equal Cardiovascular Risks in Hypertensive Patients Treated with Selective and Nonselective NSAIDS
A Taiwanese study of 55,629 hypertensive patients shows no increased risk of major cardiovascular events comparing outcomes of patients started on COX-2 selective NSAIDs compared with nonselective NSAIDs (including ibuprofen, diclofenac and naproxen).
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Are ANA Tests Unreliable?
Pisetsky and colleagues have reported in the Annals of Rheumatic Disease that ANA tests done on established SLE patients may yield surprisingly disparate results.While ANA negative lupus was a problem of old assays and the loss of ANA positivity may be seen with chronicity or age, most rheumatologists believe that ANA positivity is an absolute requirement for the diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus.
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ASCO/NCCN Guidelines for Checkpoint Inhibitor Immune-Related Adverse Events
New guidelines have been developed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) on how to assess and manage of immune checkpoint inhibitor side effects that are often autoimmune in nature.
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Pediatric Use of TNF inhbitors Does Not Increase Malignancy Risk
A study of USA administrative claims data between 2000 to 2014 assessed the risk of cancer with exposure to tumour necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) in pediatric patients and found that TNFi therapy did not significantly increase the risk compared those not receiving TNFi.
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HERO Trial - Hydroxychloroquine Fails in Hand Osteoarthritis
UK researchers have treated 248 patients with moderate to severe hand pain and radiographic osteoarthritis (OA) and demonstrated no benefit after 12 months of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), according to a recent article in Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Calcium and Vitamin D Do Not Increase Cardiac Events/Death
An analysis of the UK Biobank study found no link between calcium/vitamin D supplementation and incident cardiovascular events/deaths in a large prospective study of 475,255 men and women aged 40 to 69 years.
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Apremilast Continues to Look Good in Behcet's Disease
The 2018 American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting features recent findings of a phase III trial of apremilast in active Behçet’s Disease, showing significant reductions in oral ulcers at week 12 for those treated with apremilast 30 mg twice daily.
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The RheumNow Week in Review - 16 February 2018
Dr. Jack Cush reviews highlights, news and recent research published this week on RheumNow.com. This week's report includes news on social media, new rituximab indications, steroid complications, DECT in Gout, T2T in gout, Dementia and rheumatology numbers.
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NHANES Survey Shows OA Rising and RA Declining
An analysis of 43,706 adults from the 1999-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) demonstrated temporal trends in the prevalence of arthritis, including a rise in osteoarthritis (OA) from 6.6% to 14.3%, while the prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) decreased from 5.9%
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Abatacept Improves GvHD Outcomes
The results from a phase 2 clinical trial presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting demonstrated that the drug abatacept was highly effective in managing severe acute graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) in patients receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplants.
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