Rheumatic diseases articles from across Nature Portfolio

Osteoarthritis is a painful and debilitating condition. Here, the authors show that NGFR, a receptor for NGF, restricts NF-κB activation and its deficiency in skeletal cells impairs the remodeling and repair of osteoarthritic joints.

Early identification of osteoarthritis (OA) prior to the development of symptoms is challenging. Post-traumatic OA provides a model for the development of OA following a defined event. In this Review, the authors describe the existing knowledge relating to the biomarkers of post-traumatic OA, which might also be applicable to the identification of early non-traumatic OA.

This Review discusses joint-specific memory (the tendency of arthritis to recur in previously inflamed joints), explores the involvement of resident memory T cells and other contributors, and evaluates how arthritis might spread to new joints, emphasizing the important of sustained treatment.

Although many autoimmune diseases are characterized by the presence of autoantibodies, complete characterisation of autoantibody repertoires is lacking. Here, the authors introduce an autoantigen-specific Fab profiling method to show that the autoantibody repertoire in rheumatoid arthritis is diverse yet dominated only by a few clones.

Multidimensional and single-cell profiling of peripheral blood and inflamed tissues is a powerful and high-resolution tool for the stratification of patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases into distinct cellular and/or molecular endotypes. The road towards precision rheumatology is long, but the time has come to enter the territory of clinical validation.

In a head-to-head phase III trial of two drugs that target IL-5 or its receptor, benralizumab was noninferior to mepolizumab for the induction of remission in patients with eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis.

Despite the transformative potential of treatments for systemic autoinflammatory diseases, these conditions remain underfunded and understudied. Urgent, coordinated action among stakeholders is needed to overcome regulatory and research barriers, as is innovation and advocacy for the development of effective therapies for these rare diseases.

A nanoparticle-based formulation of the anticancer drug pazopanib, which inhibits VEGFR1 and VEGFR2, shows promise as a disease-modifying drug for osteoarthritis.

EULAR’s 2023 updated recommendations for the non-pharmacological treatment of hip and knee osteoarthritis reiterates and confirms, in an abbreviated form, what we have known for more than a decade. Unfortunately, the abbreviated format of the updated recommendations lacks specificity and clinical usefulness. More detailed guidance could have facilitated wider uptake and improved care.