Evaluating Therapeutic Treatments for Psoriatic Arthritis: Can We Make Better use of Patient Data Registries?

Can SOCS make arthritis better?

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by autoimmunity and infiltration of joint synovium by activated inflammatory cells, including neutrophils, macrophages, lymphocytes, plasma cells, and osteoclasts (reviewed in ref. 1). Morbidity in RA occurs secondary to the destruction of cartilage and bone by an inflammatory mass termed the pannus, which consists predom...

Treatments for psoriatic arthritis

Psoriatic arthritis clinical registries and genomics.

To understand better a complex disease such as psoriatic arthritis (PsA), collection of a large amount of information on clinical, laboratory, and radiological features is required over an extended period of time. Longitudinal data can be effectively collected and stored in clinical registries and databases. This article reviews current databases in PsA and proposes a structure for an internati...

Cord Blood Transplantation: Can We Make it Better?

Umbilical cord blood is an established source of hematopoietic stem cells for transplantation. It enjoys several advantages over bone marrow or peripheral blood, including increased tolerance for Human Leukocyte Antigen mismatches, decreased incidence of graft-versus-host disease, and easy availability. Unrelated cord blood does have limitations, however, especially in the treatment of adults. ...

Computer-Mediated Communication: Can we Make it Better?

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is fundamentally different to face-to-face (FTF) communication. The low bandwidth of CMC filters out important social and contextual cues, which results in behaviour in users that is different to FTF communication. There are a number of social psychological theories that attempt to explain why reduced social cues in CMC affect behaviour. This work attempts ...