Rheum Round-up: Interview—Rheumatology During COVID-19, Racial Disparities in Opioid Prescriptions, and more

Here are the top stories recently covered by DocWire News in the rheumatology section. In this edition, read about rheumatology-related misinformation spreading during the COVID-19 pandemic, pain in minority rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients at the time of arthroplasty, muscle stiffness in healthy adults, and the correlation between race and opioid receipt in long bone fracture patients.

DocWire News interviewed Michael Putman, MD, Assistant Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin and medical advisor to CreakyJoints®, and Lauren Gelman, MS, Director, Editorial Services, CreakyJoints and the Global Healthy Living Foundation, to discuss a recent paper highlighting the unique difficulties the pandemic has placed on rheumatologists and their patients. COVID-19 has presented significant challenges to the medical community—converting operations to telemedicine, refocusing efforts on COVID-19-related tasks, and learning how to navigate a new illness while learning on the fly. Researchers are scrambling to learn as much as possible about COVID-19 and put out good, useful, factual data; however, with the rapid spread of information inevitably comes the rapid spread of misinformation.

Previous research has found that black and Hispanic osteoarthritis patients, compared to white patients, have poorer baseline pain and function when presenting for total hip arthroplasty or total knee arthroplasty. However, the same may not be true for black and Hispanic patients with RA, according to a study published in the August: Health Disparities issue of BMC Rheumatology.

A study assessed the prevalence of muscle stiffness among patients without rheumatological diseases. According to the results, healthy patients are also at risk for muscle stiffness, which becomes more prevalent with age; it also may begin affecting other domains of life in older age.

A study found that pain scores did not dictate whether long bone fracture patients were treated with opioids. Instead, race and age played a significant role in determining what class of pain medication patients received.