Rheumatoid Arthritis

A protein released when rheumatoid arthritis is present in the body may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. The surprise finding in a mouse study may explain why people with rheumatoid arthritis have lower rates of developing Alzheimer's. Experts used to think that the drugs that people took for rheumatoid arthritis -- called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs -- also reduced the risk of Alzheimer's disease. That led to clinical trials to see if NSAIDs reduced the risk of Alzheimer's in a range of patients.

Shares of biotech giant Amgen Inc. slumped Wednesday as investors reacted to weaker-than-expected first-quarter sales. Shares of the Thousand Oaks company dropped $6.41, or nearly 6%, to $106.35 in trading Wednesday. The company's stock had posted impressive gains until this week, up 65% in the last year. Amgen reported first-quarter results after the markets closed Tuesday. Its net income rose 21% to $1.4 billion, or $1.88 a share, from $1.2 billion, or $1.48 a share, a year earlier.

Regular exercise can be beneficial to people with rheumatoid arthritis, but a study finds that two out of five people with the disease may not be active at all. The study, released Thursday in the journal Arthritis Care & Research , looked at how much physical activity was done over seven days by 176 adults age 23 to 86 who had rheumatoid arthritis. Instead of having the study participants report their activity, researchers had them wear accelerometers for a week, small devices that are fairly good measurements of physical activity and give a fuller picture of daily movement compared to pedometers.

Shares of biotech giant Amgen Inc. slumped as investors reacted to weaker-than-expected first-quarter sales. Shares of the Thousand Oaks company dropped $7.83, or 7%, to $104.93 in trading Wednesday. The company's stock had posted impressive gains until this week, up 65% in the last year. Amgen reported first-quarter results after the markets closed Tuesday. Its net income rose 21% to $1.4 billion, or $1.88 a share, from $1.2 billion, or $1.48, a year earlier. But analysts and investors focused much of their attention on Amgen's revenue growth, which came in lower than Wall Street's expectations.

This isn't an easy subject for me, but it's one many will relate to. I have rheumatoid arthritis. Thanks to the wonders of medical science and a doctor who worked with me for five years to get my "Molotov cocktail" just right, I am, for the most part, in remission. I'm hoping by sharing the beginning and middle of my journey (I won't say end, because this disease is not curable) I will provide others with some encouragement. Before RA, I was being treated for chronic sciatic nerve and joint pain -- I was given more than 45 cortisone injections and physical therapy.

Moderate drinking may have some heart-healthy benefits, but its protective effects might not stop there. A new study suggests that alcohol might diminish the intensity of rheumatoid arthritis symptoms and could lessen the risk of getting the disease. The study, published online this week in the journal Rheumatology, examined drinking frequency in 873 white men and women with erosive, or inflammatory, RA, as well as 1,004 healthy people. In questionnaires, they were asked how many days over the last month they had had at least one alcoholic drink.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder that progresses from joint pain to joint destruction and disfigurement. But that progression can be dramatically slowed by a class of medications called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs , or DMARDs for short. If started early, these drugs can preserve patients’ joints for years, allowing them to continue working and improving their overall quality of life. So why aren’t all RA patients taking them? That’s a question that a group of researchers from Stanford, Brown, Harvard and UC San Francisco set out to answer.

Cypress Bioscience Inc. said it received government clearance to sell a blood-filtering treatment used to ease the pain and inflammation caused by rheumatoid arthritis. The Food and Drug Administration clearance frees the company to try to carve a niche in the growing rheumatoid arthritis market, which analysts say could top $2 billion. For rheumatoid patients--40% of whom are debilitated so quickly they cannot work within six years--the device could offer a crucial new option.

Every few months, the medical journals report another promising treatment for rheumatoid arthritis: cancer drugs, radiation, interferon, estrogen, transplant medicines, blood purification, fish oil and more. Why? Because no one knows what causes rheumatoid arthritis. No single therapy works for every victim. There is no cure. The best doctors can hope is to quell the pain and, perhaps, to slow the destruction of the body's joints.

One year ago, California began moving certain Medi-Cal patients into a managed healthcare system with the goal of saving money while better coordinating treatment. But for some of these low-income seniors and disabled patients, the transition has been anything but smooth, forcing severely ill patients to give up their doctors, delay treatment and travel long distances for specialty care. As of this month, the state has transitioned 333,000 people, many with diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus and metastatic cancer.

One year ago, California began moving certain Medi-Cal patients into a managed healthcare system with the goal of saving money while better coordinating treatment. But for some of these low-income seniors and disabled patients, the transition has been anything but smooth, forcing severely ill patients to give up their doctors, delay treatment and travel long distances for specialty care. As of this month, the state has transitioned 333,000 people, many with diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus and metastatic cancer.

Flavocoxid--an arthritis treatment marketed as an effective counter to joint inflammation-- appears to cause "clinically significant liver injury" in some patients, and physicians should probably discourage their patients from taking it, says a new study and its accompanying editorial. Drawing on the records of 877 patients followed by the national Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, researchers publishing in the Annals of Internal Medicine cite three cases in which flavocoxid use was found to be the "very likely" cause of acute liver injury, and a fourth in which liver injury was found to be "possibly due to" flavocoxid use. All four patients recovered their full liver function after discontinuing use of flavocoxid.

More than 4.5 million people in the U.S. are walking around with knee replacements, a study finds, and replacement surgeries have more than doubled in the last 10 years. The study, presented this week at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting in San Francisco, provided a glimpse into not only how prevalent knee replacements have become, but who's having them and why. Researchers analyzed data from the U.S. Census, the National Health Interview Survey, the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study and the Osteoarthritis Initiative.

Regular exercise can be beneficial to people with rheumatoid arthritis, but a study finds that two out of five people with the disease may not be active at all. The study, released Thursday in the journal Arthritis Care & Research , looked at how much physical activity was done over seven days by 176 adults age 23 to 86 who had rheumatoid arthritis. Instead of having the study participants report their activity, researchers had them wear accelerometers for a week, small devices that are fairly good measurements of physical activity and give a fuller picture of daily movement compared to pedometers.

Thanks to the conveniences of the wired world, Peter Winkler was able to write a book and find an agent and a publisher without ever having to leave his North Hollywood home. Winkler raced to produce the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor died in May 2010. It was only when the book was on the shelves that his agent learned how he had done it. "My God, I had no idea," said Robert Diforio of Weston, Conn., who sold "Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel" to a small East Coast publisher, Barricade Books.

Seeing the movements of a healthy hand mirroring one's own movements plays a welcome trick on the brains of arthritis sufferers, a new study shows: It reduces the perception of pain. The observation, reported this week at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference , could offer a safe, inexpensive means of dampening chronic pain by enlisting the brain's power of suggestion. The small  arthritis study, which tested just eight subjects, comes from the lab of UC San Diego neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran -- who first used mirror-based trickery to treat phantom-limb pain in patients who have had an amputation.

A new drug called etanercept can dramatically reduce the painful symptoms experienced by the more than 2 million Americans who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, according to a study in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston gave 89 volunteers who suffered from long-term rheumatoid arthritis twice-weekly injections of the drug or a placebo in addition to their regular methotrexate treatments.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disorder that progresses from joint pain to joint destruction and disfigurement. But that progression can be dramatically slowed by a class of medications called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs , or DMARDs for short. If started early, these drugs can preserve patients’ joints for years, allowing them to continue working and improving their overall quality of life. So why aren’t all RA patients taking them? That’s a question that a group of researchers from Stanford, Brown, Harvard and UC San Francisco set out to answer.

Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, as the name suggests, is rare and not life-threatening. But the swollen joints and inflammation caused by this disease can be devastating for very young children. Maggie Root was just 2 when a swollen toe signaled something was wrong. The Virginia girl says in this Newport News Daily Press story : "My fingers started hurting, and my neck. My fingers were all red," she says. The disease affects about 300,000 children in the United States, and its cause remains unknown.