Many guidelines, including the 2017 ACR Guideline for the Prevention and Treatment of Glucocorticoid-Induced Osteoporosis (GIOP), do not recommend anabolic therapy as initial treatment for osteoporosis and GIOP.

Showcasing cutting-edge rheumatology research from around the world, six of the top abstracts submitted for this year’s Annual Meeting were presented during Tuesday’s Plenary III session.

The “holy grail” in the quest to identify and validate new biomarkers, said Jill Buyon, MD, is the hope that biomarkers will aid the clinician in managing the patient, help to sort out phenotypic heterogeneity, inform about pathogenesis, and provide targets for therapy to achieve “biomarker coverage.”

Researchers and clinicians alike get increasingly excited as science advances and the dream of personalized — and more effective — medicine draws closer to reality. But personalized medicine has ethical considerations and unintended consequences to address.

Patients are turning to cannabis for a variety of uses, especially chronic pain, and report having positive effects from the use. But the clinical evidence available is a “mish-mash of studies,” said Mary-Ann Fitzcharles, MD.

A national physician survey found that bureaucratic tasks such as paperwork contributed the most to burnout. That same survey also showed rheumatologists are almost at the bottom of the list of physicians likely to seek help, at 16%.

The team of Jean W. Liew, MD, and Joanna Marco, MD, along with consultant Grant Hughes, MD, from the University of Washington held off the Elbow-Knee team from Albany Medical Center and Joint Service Joint Service from Walter Reed National Medical Military Center.