CHRONIC ARTHRITIS

Chronic Arthritis

Reactive arthritis or chronic infectious arthritis?

Microbes reach the synovial cavity either directly during bacteraemia or by transport within lymphoid cells or monocytes. This may stimulate the immune system excessively, triggering arthritis. Some forms of ReA correspond to slow infectious arthritis due to the persistence of microbes and some to an infection triggered arthritis linked to an extra-articular site of infection.

Chronic sarcoid arthritis

Our findings show that the combination of splenic percussion and palpation will detect up to 88% of spleens considered to be enlarged on hepatic scintiscans. In other studies the correlation between clinical detection of splenomegaly and radiography or radioisotope scanning has been poor. Although as little as a 4000 increase in spleen size may be palpable, even massively enlarged spleens have ...

Chronic arthritis in children.

Differentiating between arthralgia and arthritis is of the utmost importance for the pediatrician. Proper joint exam, aided by adequate use of laboratory and imaging tests, makes this differentiation possible. Renee F. Modica, MD, Sukesh Sukumaran, MD, and myself give a comprehensive review of the joint exam in children, providing illustrations of the exam maneuvers and interpretations of diffe...

Cytokines in Chronic Inflammatory Arthritis

Current models of rheumatoid arthritis (RA)' implicate lymphokines in the recruitment and activation of T cells in the synovium (1, 2) . However, adequate documentation of significant amounts of these proteins in the joint is limited . In fact, recent studies have found only very low levels of IFN-y in synovial fluid (SF) and tissue of patients with RA (3) . This relative lack of IFN-y seems co...