Johns Hopkins rheumatologist Laura Cappelli discusses her latest research being presented at The American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting.
Hi, I'm Laura Capelli. I'm an Associate Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins in the division of rheumatology. And I'm excited to be presenting some of my research at AC R Convergence 2023 in one of the oral abstract sessions. So I'll give you a brief preview of my abstract presentation. Uh for the study called latent class analysis identifies two clinical fees, types of immune checkpoint inhibitor induced inflammatory arthritis. So immune checkpoint inhibitors are cancer, immunotherapy drugs. They activate the immune system, but they can cause side effects like inflammatory arthritis. And these side effects get referred to rheumatologists for management as rheumatologists. Our tendency is to equate things with the diseases. We're used to like rheumatoid arthritis or psoriatic arthritis. But in taking care of patients over the years with inflammatory arthritis that was caused by cancer immunotherapy. I noticed that there were some key differences and there was also a lot of heterogeneity in the clinical presentation of patients I was seeing and so we decided to use a data driven approach to try to define clinical phenotypes in immune checkpoint inhibitor uh inflammatory arthritis. And we did this with collaboration of Jamie Perrin one of our wonderful biostatistician and used latent class analysis to let the data drive these phenotype groups. Ultimately, we included 100 and 26 patients with inflammatory arthritis due to immune checkpoint inhibitors where we had information from their baseline visit with rheumatology. And we use these clinical features including disease activity, joint counts, auto antibodies and others to define the latent classes. Ultimately, our analysis uh led to two different groups of immune uh immune checkpoint inhibitor induced inflammatory arthritis. We had one group that was slightly smaller where they had more severe disease activity, they had more prominent upper extremity symptoms. And then we had another group with a less severe phenotype. And when we looked at potential associations, how did these groups do over time? We noted that the more severe group were more likely to have persistent inflammatory arthritis and more likely to need therapies like corticosteroids for management of their arthritis. We also noted a trend that those treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy for longer were more likely to be in the severe group. And so this is a great jumping off point for many other questions in the field of immune checkpoint inhibitor induced inflammatory arthritis. And if you want to hear more about this project, please join us at the oral abstract session at convergence. Thank you.
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