Introducing a New Series: MRI’s Recent Role in the Battle to Quell Arthritis
Arthritis encompasses a spectrum of disorders, including inflammatory ones such as rheumatoid arthritis, crystal-associated disorders like gout, and degenerative disease. It affects all age groups and can cause great pain and disability. Investigators search to elucidate the etiology of these varied joint diseases, because an understanding of their pathogenesis is crucial to preventing or arresting joint destruction.
Achieving not only symptomatic but pathologic remission proves critical to long-term joint function because – once the ravages of arthritis result in cartilage, bone, ligament, or tendon destruction – the ability to restore full structural and functional native joint integrity is forever lost.
In an issue of The WCC Note later this year, we will venture into the realm of the experimental, taking a foray into the laboratory bendh work being done to attempt to achieve cellular reprogramming and exogenous cartilage creation – work being furthered by medical imaging. Current emphasis, however, rests with early disease discovery and tailored treatment, attempting to mitigate the dire consequences of unchecked pathologic joint processes.
This week’s issue begins a series that will summarize some of the arthritis-related literature published over the past year, citing several recent studies that advance our understanding of the origins of arthritis and the cornerstone role magnetic resonance imaging plays in its diagnosis and monitoring.
We will begin our next entry with a review of rheumatoid arthritis literature, where MRI has played a role in challenging previously held notions of pathogenesis and has become a predictor of erosion and disease progression.
Research and reporting by Margaret D. Phillips, M.D.
Reviewer and publisher: Stephen J. Pomeranz, M.D.
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