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MRE Could Provide A Definitive Diagnosis For People With Muscle Pain, Study Shows
An estimated nine million men and women in the United States live with myofascial pain syndrome, a condition marked by pain that permeates muscles in the neck, back and shoulders. The condition is difficult to diagnose and not entirely understood, but research studies indicate that a new imaging technology developed at Mayo Clinic holds promise for a definitive diagnosis and, perhaps eventually, new treatments for people who have the syndrome. A Mayo Clinic study published in the November issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation shows that magnetic resonance elastography, or MRE, can provide images of the affected muscle with clarity and insight not possible with magnetic resonance…
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Vagus Nerve Stimulation: A New Way to Treat Rheumatoid Arthritis
Some people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) take a disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) and/or a biologic and reach remission. Others try drug after drug after drug and never find one that’s effective — or that treats their symptoms without causing intolerable side effects. At the same time, other patients with active disease refuse to take the most powerful and effective medications on the market or can’t take them because of their medical history or personal risk factors that would make doing so dangerous. While many scientists are continuing to explore better drug options, some are focused on developing new treatments that aren’t medications at all. One such experimental approach that’s gaining…
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Taking Hydroxychloroquine for RA or Lupus Can Reduce Heart Risk by 17%
The anti-malarial drug lowers cholesterol and blood sugar and makes blood less sticky, which is good for reducing blood clots and heart attack risk. If you take the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) as part of your treatment for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis (RA), you may be getting cardiovascular protection as an added bonus. That’s welcome news because it’s estimated that about half of lupus patients experience heart complications, and heart attacks occur at younger ages in lupus patients than in the general population. Even as young adults, black and Hispanic women with lupus often have plaque build-up in their arteries that hikes their risk of heart attack. And experts have…
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Have Asthma or COPD? You Could Have a Higher Risk of Rheumatoid Arthritis
Researchers hope that identifying the link between respiratory issues and RA will result in better ways to prevent or screen for rheumatoid arthritis in people with lung disease. You may have already heard that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are more likely to develop the serious lung disease chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which makes it increasingly difficult to breathe. In 2017, Harvard researchers examined data from the huge Nurses’ Health Study and found that women with RA were about 68 percent more likely to develop COPD. Now, some of the same research team has combined data on 205,153 participants in two waves of the Nurses’ Health Study and found…
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If You’re in Remission on a DMARD for Rheumatoid Arthritis, Should You Taper? Here’s What New Research Says
New data compares what happens when the dosage of DMARDs such as methotrexate is tapered or kept steady. For most rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, sustained remission (inactive disease) is the goal of taking methotrexate or biologic DMARDS to manage their disease. However, what to do after reaching that goal hasn’t been clear. Should RA patients stick with the medication dose that’s working or gradually taper the dose — and thus lessen both the expense of the medication and possible side effects of these powerful RA medications? Whether or not to taper is usually determined on an individual basis during discussions between individual patients and their doctors, based on shared decision-making…
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If Rheumatoid Arthritis Inflammation Is Improving, Be Patient: Less Pain and Fatigue May Be Coming
Knowing there could be a lag between objective measures of improvement and patient-reported outcomes could help prevent over-treatment. When a rheumatologist measures disease activity in a patient with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), objective clinical measures like C-reactive protein levels in the blood and swollen joint count are essential to factor in, but so are patient-reported measures including pain and fatigue. While both are certainly important, there may be some benefit to evaluating clinical factors and patient-reported measures independently rather than combining both into a composite disease activity score. (You can use our ArthritisPower app to track your symptoms and disease activity and share your results with your doctor.) According to a…
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This Is Important for RA Patients to Know: Taming Inflammation Doesn’t Always Alleviate Pain
“This may have implications for management decisions beyond treating to disease activity targets alone.” Pain and inflammation often go hand in hand, especially for people with inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis (RA). So it logically follows that when inflammatory markers decrease, less pain would follow. But according to a new study that isn’t always the case. The study, which was presented at the 2019 2019 American College of Rheumatology/Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals Annual Meeting in Atlanta, used data from three earlier trials. The authors, led by Mart A.F.J. van de Laar, MD, PhD, from Arthritis Center Twente in the Netherlands, aimed to separate patient reports of pain from objective…
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Nearly 20% of People with Spondyloarthritis Also Have Fibromyalgia, New Data Show
Female patients were much more likely to have a dual diagnosis. Small studies have suggested an overlap between spondyloarthritis (SpA) and fibromyalgia, but now a larger meta-analysis confirms it: About 17 percent of SpA patients also have fibromyalgia, compared to 2 to 8 percent of the general population that has fibromyalgia. These findings, which were based on an analysis of 15 earlier observational trials, were presented at the 2019 American College of Rheumatology/Association of Rheumatology Professionals (ACR/ARP) Annual Meeting in Atlanta. The researchers determined that females with SpA were significantly more likely than men to have the dual diagnosis of fibromyalgia. They also found that people who live with both conditions…
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30% of RA Patients Don’t See Fatigue Improve After Starting Treatment
And a few factors seemed to be responsible, including being obese and also having fibromyalgia. When most people think about rheumatoid arthritis (RA), they focus on joint pain, swelling, and stiffness. While those issues are certainly common, they tend to co-exist with another symptom — overwhelming fatigue — that can be harder for friends and family to understand. Fatigue is more than being a little tired. Earlier this year, a Chronicwoman/ArthritisPower poll found that 89 percent of people with arthritis (including but not limited to RA) said that fatigue interfered with their ability to go about their everyday activities. An important question for treating RA, then, is this: Does severe…
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Medical Marijuana for Arthritis: Does Legal Status Affect Whether Patients Use It — or Talk to Their Doctor About It?
No matter who you talk to in the chronic pain, arthritis, and musculoskeletal disease community — patients, clinicians, researchers, public health experts — medical marijuana is controversial. Is it safe? Is it effective for treating pain and inflammation? Should it be legal? While more clinical trials are sorely needed to understand the benefits and side effects of using medical marijuana to treat conditions like arthritis, it’s important to understand how patients think about and use marijuana to manage their conditions. The United States has a complicated quilt of state laws about the legal use of marijuana. Presently, 33 U.S. states have laws that allow for the legal use of marijuana…
