Mark Hwang, MD, on Inflammatory Back Pain
Dr Hwang reviews key findings of research he presented at ACR Convergence on inflammatory back pain and the importance of multimodality evaluation to identify patients with axial spondyloarthritis vs mechanical back pain.
Mark Hwang, MD, is an assistant professor of rheumatology at McGovern Medical School and codirects the Spondyloarthritis Program at the University of Texas Health-Houston in Houston, Texas.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, everyone. My name is Mark Hwang. I'm an assistant professor at UT Health Houston, where I codirect the Spondyloarthritis Program.
We just presented our abstract regarding inflammatory back pain in the US population, studying data from the National Health and Nutrition Exam Survey, which is a general population that reflects the demographics of the United States.
In this, it was interesting that we found that inflammatory back pain, as a concept, while I believe is related to spondyloarthritis, really did not seem to enrich for spondyloarthritis -related biomarkers, such as HLA-B27 positivity, or elevations of C-reactive protein.
This is interesting because while we know inflammatory back pain helps distinguish patients we see in a clinic setting who may have more mechanical chronic back pain of other etiologies, from those that have more SpA-related symptoms, while we ask that individual question if patients have inflammatory back pain through these different question sets.
Those patients, if they come into your clinic, may not really have, be more likely to have spinal arthritis than other diseases.
I think the key takeaway is that it really needs to be a multimodality situation for evaluation, both inside the clinic, certainly, and perhaps for referral, where having HLA-B27 positivity imaging suggestions of spinal arthritis should certainly help us make the diagnosis more so, and really help us fast-track those patients so we can, help slow down the diagnostic delay in stone arthritis, and hopefully get these patients treated and feeling better sooner.
Thank you for your attention. Have a great day
