Volume 14 Issue 6, June 2018

Patients with psoriatic arthritis and other inflammatory joint diseases have a high risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), but use relatively little preventive medication such as antihypertensive and lipid lowering agents. An unmet need exists for the optimization of CVD prevention in this high-risk patient population.

Pain management can be a difficult problem for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), some of whom can experience pain similar to that reported by patients with fibromyalgia. Now, advanced imaging techniques are revealing neurobiological alterations in patients with RA that mirror those seen in fibromyalgia, hinting at new treatment possibilities.

Mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) influence several molecular processes underlying the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis (OA), and mtDNA variants are associated with the development and progression of knee OA, pointing to a role for mtDNA variation in OA pathogenesis and its phenotypic presentation.

In this Review, the authors summarize the results of genetics studies that confirm the importance of modulating urate levels in gout pathophysiology, and discuss how these discoveries could be applied to the treatment of hyperuricaemia and gout.

The use of biomarkers for drug development, clinical investigation and management is fundamental to the success of molecular medicine. This Review discusses the framework for the development of biomarkers as drug development tools, including discovery, analytical validation, clinical qualification and utilization.

Axial disease occurs in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and ankylosing spondylitis, but questions remain over whether axial PsA is a distinct disease. In this Review, the authors address the current state of knowledge concerning axial PsA and propose a research agenda.

In this Perspectives article, Roemer et al. argue that the time has come to use MRI, rather than radiography, as the primary imaging modality for defining eligibility criteria for clinical trials of potential disease-modifying osteoarthritis drugs (DMOADs).