Myositis

The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) is set to hold its 2023 Clinical & Scientific Conference on March 19-22, at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas, and ...

Learning more about it, and interacting with some of the researchers is going to be important. A lot of these patients go to a hepatologist before they are referred to rheumatology or neurology, and I think that's a bias that exists in our training system. We're going to talk about practical considerations in gene therapy—it's gained a lot of traction in the neuromuscular disease field, so how do we implement that? More and more of these cases will show up, and I think the neurologists, in general, need to be aware of it, but also primary care physicians need to be aware of it. Tahseen Mozaffar, MD: I would say that a majority of the neurologists are not as familiar with the recent advances in myositis, and the improvement in terms of the disease classification systems, and the importance of antibody testing to further diagnose and stratified diseases. If you look at the census data, that is an almost an exponential growth, and that's the group of people that also are susceptible to inclusion body myositis. But even more importantly, I think there is an immense need to cross collaborate—working with rheumatology, working with dermatology, working with pulmonary—and one of the things that I would emphasize is there is a huge benefit in doing collaborative clinics or multidisciplinary clinics with rheumatology and other specialties. And one of the big adverse effects is myositis. I know some of the other folks in the country are doing it. So having a better understanding of that, not only the disease and how to manage it, but then also where you can get input from. This new entity of immune mediated necrotizing myopathy is related to some of the cancer chemotherapies, especially the immune checkpoint inhibitors that we will talk about. MDA plans to host sessions on the latest research advancements and clinical achievement, with a particular focus on emerging technologies in genetic medicine this year.