Steven Vlad

I again hit the plenary session today.  I’m only going to talk about one of the abstracts presented, and that’s the last one by Dr. Englund.  He looked a knee MRIs in a community population and found that tears or maceration (destruction) of the meniscus – the ‘padding’ of the knee joint, if you will…

This is a fun session that reviews highlights of the rheumatology literature over the last year. I won’t go into the clinical stuff because I’m not sure I agree with the selections, but the basic science stuff was interesting. This is a field I’m really not familiar with and therefore I really can’t go into…

I’m not going to go into too much detail here; a lot of this was quite technical.  But the major point is that you have to have standardized ways to assess whether or not a drug works for a disease.  When you have complicated multi-system diseases like RA, this can be especially complicated.  If you…

So the plenary sessions are where what the selection committees thought were the most important research abstracts submitted are presented.  The first plenary session hit the highlights in RA research. I’m not going to go too nuts and describe everything presented in detail.  The first two abstracts presented were heavy duty basic research items, and…

Woof!  It really has! So the conference proper began today and it’s made quite a difference.  I think the population at the convention center jumped about 10-fold today.  No kidding!  Last year I’m told there were 12,000 people at the conference, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that number were here this year…

I have little to report from the ACR conference today.  We had the board review course which is very good but nothing struck me as being very bloggable.  I have, however, met a few old friends.  One woman I went to school with, though we had very little time to talk, and an old mentor/friend…