Arthritis is a term often used to mean any disorder that affects joints. Symptoms generally include joint pain and stiffness. Other symptoms may include redness, warmth, swelling, and decreased range of motion of the affected joints. In some types of arthritis, other organs are also affected. Onset can be gradual or sudden.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a long-term autoimmune disorder that primarily affects joints. It typically results in warm, swollen, and painful joints. Pain and stiffness often worsen following rest. Most commonly, the wrist and hands are involved, with the same joints typically involved on both sides of the body. The disease may also affect other parts of the body, including skin, eyes, lungs, heart, nerves, and blood. This may result in a low red blood cell count, inflammation around the lungs, and inflammation around the heart. Fever and low energy may also be present. Often, symptoms come on gradually over weeks to months.
Giant cell arteritis (GCA), also called temporal arteritis, is an inflammatory autoimmune disease of large blood vessels. Symptoms may include headache, pain over the temples, flu-like symptoms, double vision, and difficulty opening the mouth. Complications can include blockage of the artery to the eye with resulting blindness, as well as aortic dissection, and aortic aneurysm. GCA is frequently associated with polymyalgia rheumatica. It can be confirmed by biopsy of the temporal artery in about 90% of people.
Fibromyalgia is a medical condition which causes chronic widespread pain, accompanied by fatigue, waking unrefreshed, and cognitive symptoms. Other symptoms include headaches, lower abdominal pain or cramps, and depression. People with fibromyalgia can also experience insomnia and a general hypersensitivity.
Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a type of arthritis characterized by long-term inflammation of the joints of the spine, typically where the spine joins the pelvis. With AS, eye and bowel problems, and back pain may occur. Joint mobility in the affected areas sometimes worsens over time. Ankylosing spondylitis is believed to involve a combination of genetic and environmental factors. More than 90% of people affected in the UK have a specific human leukocyte antigen known as the HLA-B27 antigen. The underlying mechanism is believed to be autoimmune or autoinflammatory. Diagnosis is based on symptoms with support from medical imaging and blood tests. AS is a type of seronegative spondyloarthropathy, meaning that tests show no presence of rheumatoid factor (RF) antibodies.
Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), formerly known as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA), is the most common chronic rheumatic disease of childhood, affecting approximately 3.8 to 400 out of 100,000 children. Juvenile, in this context, refers to disease onset before 16 years of age, while idiopathic refers to a condition with no defined cause, and arthritis is inflammation within the joint.
Granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), also known as Wegener's granulomatosis (WG), after the German physician Friedrich Wegener, is a rare long-term systemic disorder that involves the formation of granulomas and inflammation of blood vessels (vasculitis). It is an autoimmune disease and a form of vasculitis that affects small- and medium-size vessels in many organs but most commonly affects the upper respiratory tract, lungs and kidneys. The signs and symptoms of GPA are highly varied and reflect which organs are supplied by the affected blood vessels. Typical signs and symptoms include nosebleeds, stuffy nose and crustiness of nasal secretions, and inflammation of the uveal layer of the eye. Damage to the heart, lungs and kidneys can be fatal.
A nurse-led clinic is any outpatient clinic that is run or managed by registered nurses, usually nurse practitioners or Clinical Nurse Specialists in the UK. Nurse-led clinics have assumed distinct roles over the years, and examples exist within hospital outpatient departments, public health clinics and independent practice environments.
Patient education is a planned interactive learning process designed to support and enable expert patients to manage their life with a disease and/or optimise their health and well-being.
Adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD) is a form of Still's disease, a rare systemic autoinflammatory disease characterized by the classic triad of fevers, joint pain, and a distinctive salmon-colored bumpy rash. The disease is considered a diagnosis of exclusion. Levels of the iron-binding protein ferritin may be extremely elevated with this disorder. AOSD may present in a similar manner to other inflammatory diseases and to autoimmune diseases, which must be ruled out before making the diagnosis.
Anti-citrullinated protein antibodies (ACPAs) are autoantibodies that are directed against peptides and proteins that are citrullinated. They are present in the majority of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Clinically, cyclic citrullinated peptides (CCP) are frequently used to detect these antibodies in patient serum or plasma.
Schnitzler syndrome or Schnitzler's syndrome is a rare disease characterised by onset around middle age of chronic hives (urticaria) and periodic fever, bone pain and joint pain, weight loss, malaise, fatigue, swollen lymph glands and enlarged spleen and liver.
Cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome (CAPS) is a group of rare, heterogeneous autoinflammatory disease characterized by interleukin 1β-mediated systemic inflammation and clinical symptoms involving skin, joints, central nervous system, and eyes. It encompasses a spectrum of three clinically overlapping autoinflammatory syndromes including familial cold autoinflammatory syndrome, the Muckle–Wells syndrome (MWS), and neonatal-onset multisystem inflammatory disease that were originally thought to be distinct entities, but in fact share a single genetic mutation and pathogenic pathway, and keratoendotheliitis fugax hereditaria in which the autoinflammatory symptoms affect only the anterior segment of the eye.
Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) is a method for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) or conjoint analysis, as implemented by decision-making software and conjoint analysis products 1000minds and MeenyMo.
In multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA), multicriteria classification involves problems where a finite set of alternative actions should be assigned into a predefined set of preferentially ordered categories (classes). For example, credit analysts classify loan applications into risk categories, customers rate products and classify them into attractiveness groups, candidates for a job position are evaluated and their applications are approved or rejected, technical systems are prioritized for inspection on the basis of their failure risk, clinicians classify patients according to the extent to which they have a complex disease or not, etc.
Antisynthetase syndrome (ASS) is a multisystematic autoimmune disease associated with inflammatory myositis, interstitial lung disease, and antibodies directed against various synthetases of aminoacyl-transfer RNA. Other common symptoms include mechanic's hands, Raynaud's phenomenon, arthritis, and fever.
Axial spondyloarthritis is a chronic, immune-mediated disease predominantly affecting the axial skeleton. The term itself is an umbrella term characterizing a diverse disease family united by shared clinical and genetic features, such as the involvement of the axial skeleton. The 2009 introduced term axial spondyloarthritis is a preferred term nowadays and substitutes the old term ankylosing spondylitis.
Nicola Dalbeth is a New Zealand academic rheumatologist whose research focuses on understanding the impact and mechanisms of gout. She supports clinical and laboratory research programmes and holds dual appointments as a full professor at the University of Auckland and as a consultant for the Auckland District Health Board.
Josef Smolen is an Austrian rheumatologist and immunologist and professor emeritus at the Medical University of Vienna. Since 2018 he is chairman emeritus of the Department of Internal Medicine 3 and the Division of Rheumatology at the Medical University of Vienna and Vienna General Hospital and was the chairman of the 2nd Medical Department and Center for Diagnosis and Therapy of Rheumatic Diseases at the Lainz Hospital, now the Hietzing Clinic of the Vienna Health Association from 1989 to 2017.
