Arthritis Care & Research

OBJECTIVE: To understand how the expansion of rheumatology supply and the introduction of multidisciplinary care was associated with access to rheumatology services. METHOD: We accessed Population Data BC, a longitudinal database with de-identified individual-level health data on all residents of British Columbia (BC), Canada, to analyse physician visits and prescribing from 2010/11 to 2019/20. We calculated access as the time from referral to first rheumatologist visit, and for people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), time to first disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD)...

OBJECTIVE: To update a method to identify comorbid conditions using only medication information in circumstances where diagnosis codes may be under-captured, such as in single-specialty EHRs, and to compare the distribution of comorbidities across Rx-Risk vs. other traditional comorbidity indices. METHODS: Using First Databank (FDB), RxNorm, and its web-based clients, RxNav and RxClass, we mapped Drug Concept Unique Identifiers (RxCUIs), National Drug Codes (NDCs), and Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes to Rx-Risk, a medication-focused comorbidity index...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of a three-month physiotherapist-delivered eHealth physical activity program compared with usual care to improve function in adults with low back pain or knee osteoarthritis in rural Australia. METHODS: Parallel, two-group, pragmatic, superiority, randomised controlled trial involving three and six-month post-treatment follow-ups. PARTICIPANTS/SETTING: 156 adults with chronic non-specific low back pain (n=97) or knee osteoarthritis (n=59) from rural Australia...

OBJECTIVE: Current recommendations suggest that patients with newly presenting arthritis suspected of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) should undergo routine radiographs of hands and feet (X-HF) as the presence of RA-associated erosions might be of diagnostic and prognostic value. Our objective was investigate the prevalence, diagnostic and prognostic value of RA-associated erosions seen on routine X-HF in a large, recent cohort of newly presenting arthritis patients. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study was performed between 2016-2019 in patients with newly presenting arthritis suspected of RA...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic performance of EULAR, ACR and NICE criteria with using clinical experts' diagnosis of clinically relevant knee osteoarthritis (OA) as the outcome of interest. METHODS: In a previous study, we recruited clinical experts to evaluate longitudinal (5, 8 and 10 years follow-up) clinical and radiographic data of symptomatic knees from the CHECK cohort for the presence or absence of clinically relevant OA. In the current study, ACR, EULAR and NICE criteria were applied to the same 5, 8 and 10 years follow-up data; then a knee was diagnosed with OA if fulfilling the criteria at one of the three time points (F1), two of the time points (F2) or at all three time points (F3)...

OBJECTIVE: To determine the impact of emerging safety data on practice patterns by describing the characteristics of patients initiating and discontinuing advanced therapies for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) before and after January 2021. METHODS: This cohort study evaluated U.S. Veterans with RA between April 2019 and September 2022. This period was divided into two 664-day periods before and after January 2021. Eligible patients had ≥1 diagnosis code for RA and initiated a tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi), non-TNFi biologic, or Janus kinase inhibitor (JAKi)...

OBJECTIVE: Examine the relationships of work productivity and activity impairment with key patient-reported outcomes (PROs) assessing pain, disease activity, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS). METHODS: This post hoc analysis pooled available data from baseline to end of the double-blind phase of phase II/III placebo-controlled tofacitinib trials in patients with active AS. A repeated measures longitudinal model assessed the relationships (linear or non-linear) between Work Productivity and Activity Impairment questionnaire in Spondyloarthritis (WPAI:SpA) domains (absenteeism, activity impairment, presenteeism, and productivity loss) as outcomes, and key PROs (total back pain, nocturnal spinal pain, Patient Global Assessment of Disease Activity, AS Quality of Life, EuroQol 5-Dimension [EQ-5D] 3-Level, and EQ-5D Visual Analog Scale) as predictors...

OBJECTIVE: To determine the proportion of new medication prescriptions observed in electronic health records (EHR) that represent true incident medication use, accounting for undocumented previous prescriptions (prevalent medication use) and failure to initiate treatment (primary non-adherence) with linked administrative claims data as the reference standard METHODS: Using single-specialty rheumatology EHR data from more than 700 community practices in the United States linked to administrative claims data, we identified first (index) EHR prescriptions and assessed the positive predictive value (PPV) of different EHR-derived new user definitions to identify true incident use (no prior claims)...

OBJECTIVE: To report the burden and correlates of poor physical performance in a diverse cohort of individuals with SLE. METHODS: In this single-visit study of 446 individuals with SLE from a population-based metropolitan Atlanta cohort, we measured physical performance via the Short Physical Performance Battery [score range, 0-12; intermediate-low (<10) vs. high (≥10)]. We also collected demographic, clinical, and psychosocial variables and examined the associations [adjusted odds ratios (aORs)] of intermediate-low vs...

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to determine whether clinical, health-related quality of life (HRQL), and gait characteristics in adults with knee osteoarthritis (OA) differed by obesity category. METHODS: This cross-sectional analysis of 823 older adults (mean age, 64.6 years, SD, 7.8) with knee OA and overweight/obesity compared clinical, HRQL, and gait outcomes between obesity classifications (overweight/class I, BMI,27.0-34.9 kg/m2 ; class II, BMI,35...

OBJECTIVE: The objective is to update recommendations for prevention and treatment of glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis (GIOP) for patients with rheumatic or nonrheumatic conditions receiving >3 months treatment with glucocorticoids (GCs) ≥2.5 mg daily. METHODS: An updated systematic literature review was performed for clinical questions on nonpharmacologic, pharmacologic treatments, discontinuation of medications, and sequential therapy. Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach was used to rate the certainty of evidence...

OBJECTIVE: Axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) patients often experience significant delay between symptom onset and diagnosis for reasons that are incompletely understood. We investigated associations between demographic, medical, and socioeconomic factors and axSpA diagnostic delay. METHODS: We identified patients meeting modified New York criteria for ankylosing spondylitis (AS) or 2009 Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society criteria for axSpA in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system between December 1990 and October 2021...

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OBJECTIVE: To advance understanding of how persons with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) experience decision-making about adopting public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Persons living with RA partnered throughout this nested qualitative study. One-to-one semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with participants with RA between December 2020 and December 2021. They were strategically sampled from a randomized controlled trial that was underway to test a physical activity counselling intervention...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The digitization of medical records and expanding electronic health records has created an era of "Big Data" with an abundance of available information ranging from clinical notes to imaging studies. In the field of rheumatology, medical imaging is used to guide both diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of rheumatic conditions. Although there is an abundance of data to analyze, traditional methods of image analysis are human resource intensive. Fortunately, the growth of artificial intelligence may be a solution to handle large datasets...

OBJECTIVE: Supported self-management interventions for individuals with systemic sclerosis (SSc) are needed. We examined effects of a 12-week resilience-building, energy management program (called RENEW) for fatigue and other patient-reported outcomes. METHODS: Participants, who had physician-diagnosed SSc, moderate to severe fatigue, and were ≥ 18 years old, were randomly assigned to RENEW or waitlist control in a 2:1 ratio. The RENEW intervention included an educational website/app plus 9 virtual peer-led health coaching sessions...

BACKGROUND: Mendelian randomization (MR) has increasingly been utilized as a tool for establishing causal relations between modifiable exposures and osteoarthritis (OA). OBJECTIVE: The goal of this review was to summarize available MR studies of OA that evaluate the causal role of modifiable risk factors on OA. METHODS: This review was performed following the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews) model...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.