What is new in Sjögren’s Syndrome (EULAR 2013)

Hendrika Bootsma (The Netherlands) at EULAR 2013 Madrid, June 14.

Diagnosis / classification criteria

Criteria must be clear, easy to apply and specific. “The previous AECG classification criteria for Sjögren’s syndrome had been criticized for including subjective tests (symptoms of oral and ocular dryness), physiologic measures that lack specificity, and objective tests that are not diagnostically equivalent. Therefore, the Sjögren’s International Collaborative Clinical Alliance Research Groups proposed an alternative criteria set composed of only objective measures (including lip biopsy). The level of agreement between the preliminary American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria and the AECG criteria was high when all objective tests were available to define the AECG criteria but low when subjective tests were allowed to replace the objective tests.” (Bootsma, H., Spijkervet, F. K. L., Kroese, F. G. M. and Vissink, A. (2013), Toward new classification criteria for Sjögren’s syndrome?. Arthritis & Rheumatism, 65: 21–23. doi: 10.1002/art.37701) 

Dealing with a rare disease such as relapsing polychondritis: “food for thought”…

Working as a rheumatologist in an average peripheral hospital means occasionally being confronted with conditions that are quite rare. One of these conditions is Relapsing Polychondritis (RPC), a quite typical condition in terms of how it can be recognised just based on the clinical presentation. However it is a condition not seen that foten at all in a regular rheumatology outpatient clinic.

The weird thing in medicine is that rare conditions happen to be encountered clustered in time in two or three cases shortly after one another, followed by a quite long period in which one does not see the same condition.

That’s also what happened to me for Relapsing Polychondritis. As a trainee in rheumatology I was actually lucky to meet two patients with Relapsing Polychondritis within a month’ s time. Ever since I have not seen a patient with Relapsing Polychondritis untill last month, and guess what…the case was followed by another one in the same month, so again “two-in-a-row” after not having seen RPC in about 4 years.

My selection of ACR2012 Sjögren’s Syndrome Abstracts (2)

This year’s annual scientific meeting of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) included 76 accepted abstracts on Sjögren’s Syndrome. In this blogpost I name a selection of them that may have clinical relevance for rheumatologists in daily practice together with a few more basic research oriented abstracts that I personally consider of interest.

My selection of ACR2012 Sjögren’s Syndrome Abstracts (1)

It is early November, and that is usually the time of the year for the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). Indeed the ACR 2012 convention has just ended while adding this blogpost. It took place in Washington, D.C., from November 9-14. I did not physically attend it, but -and that’s new- I would almost say it has been the first scientific meeting I could almost attend virtually (live video- and aaudiostrems from the meeting would provide a strikethrough for the word “almost” in this sentence). Thousands of tweets from all kinds of authors attending the ACR 2012 convention passed in my Twitter timeline. Whilst on a previous occasion one could make a nice survey of topics discussed at the ACR or (european counterpart) EULAR meetings by downloading a transcript of all tweets with the meeting’s hashtag via Symplur, on this occasion one could speak of a twitter tsunami. The tweets containing the hashtag #ACR2012 were so numerous that the previously mentioned transcript downloads via Symplur no longer satisfied my objective to obtain a nice survey of the meeting (this might change when Symplur decides to add more query features then only filtering based on a specified time-interval, i.e. if one could filter all tweets containing the #ACR2012 hashtag including the word “gout” it could still deliver a nice transcript of what came by via Twitter on the topic gout).