one woman with red hair and one woman with dark hair and glasses smiling on a black background
General Education, Podcast, Rheumer Has It

Rheumer Has It: Our Most Exciting Takeaways from the ACR 2025 Rheumatology Conference 

2 days ago
31 min read
Add comment
FacebookXRedditPinterestEmail

Listen Now:

Watch Now:

Summary:

On this episode of ‘Rheumer Has It,’ Eileen and Cheryl delve into the latest advancements and key takeaways from the American College of Rheumatology’s Annual Conference. They discuss groundbreaking treatments like CAR T-cell therapy, Neuroimmodulators like Vagus Nerve Stimulator Devices, GLP-1 medications. They also reflect on new insights into mental health, cognitive dysfunction, and  the importance of the microbiome as part of lifestyle interventions. This episode offers hope, practical advice, and the latest research to help manage your condition more effectively.

Episode at a glance:

  • 00:00 Introduction to Rheumer Has It
  • 00:30 Importance of the ACR Annual Conference
  • 03:02 Sessions on Patient Health Literacy and Support Groups
  • 07:10 Dietary Interventions and Microbiome Research
  • 10:54 Mental Health and Fatigue in Rheumatic Diseases
  • 15:50 Innovative Treatments: CAR T-Cell Therapy and Vagus Nerve Stimulation
  • 19:50 GLP-1 Medications and Their Benefits
  • 25:23 Cognitive Dysfunction in Rheumatic Diseases
  • 29:22 Spotlight on Sjogren’s Disease
  • 31:50 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Medical disclaimer: 

All content found on Arthritis Life public channels (including Rheumer Has It) was created for generalized informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Episode Sponsors

Rheum to THRIVE, an online course and support program Cheryl created to help people with rheumatic disease go from overwhelmed, confused and alone to confident, supported and connected. See all the details and join the program or waitlist now! 

Speaker Bios:

Eileen Davidson Bio

Eileen Davidson, also known as Chronic Eileen, is a disability and chronic illness advocate from Vancouver BC Canada. Living with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, she spends a large focus on volunteering and creating awareness around arthritis. With The International Foundation for Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Arthritis (AiArthritis) Eileen is the Educational Media Assistant. Along with AiArthritis, Eileen is a member of the Arthritis Research Canada patient advisory board, and author with over 100 published articles.

Cheryl Crow

Cheryl is an occupational therapist who has lived with rheumatoid arthritis for over twenty years. Her life passion is helping others with rheumatoid arthritis figure out how to live a full life despite arthritis, by developing tools to navigate physical, emotional and social challenges. She formed the educational company Arthritis Life in 2019 after seeing a huge need for more engaging, accessible, and (dare I say) FUN patient education and self-management resources.

Episode links:

  • Links to things mentioned in episode or additional listening
  • “Year in Review” – major developments listed on The Rheumatologist  

Full Episode Transcript: 

[00:00:05] Eileen Davidson: Welcome to Rheumer Has It, the podcast that busts myths, highlights evidence, and inspires hope for living better with rheumatic disease. 

[00:00:15] Cheryl Crow: Through plain language discussions and interviews with experts, we offer actual knowledge so you can thrive today. 

[00:00:22] Eileen Davidson: My name is Eileen, 

[00:00:24] Cheryl Crow: And my name is Cheryl. 

[00:00:25] Eileen Davidson: Join us as we bust myths and spotlight evidence.

[00:00:29] Cheryl Crow: Yay. So today we’re gonna be sharing the most exciting things we learned at the ACR, American College of Rheumatology’s annual conference or Annual Convergence meeting. But before we do that, we wanna share a little bit about why this conference and meeting is so important. 

[00:00:47] Eileen Davidson: Well, this conference is important because it is the largest rheumatology conference in the world next to the European one or EULAR. EULAR stands for the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology.

And so at these conferences, particularly ACR and EULAR, of course, they, they have about thousands and thousands of rheumatology professionals from all over the world. And we’re not just talking rheumatologists or researchers, but there’s pharmaceutical companies, there’s always many occupational therapists, physical therapists, social workers organizations, like, international Foundation of autoimmune and Autoinflammatory arthritis was there. There was gout organizations, scleroderma organizations, sjogren’s organizations, lupus organizations and so many. \

And so it’s like the biggest event for people involved in rheumatology to get together and connect, learn, mingle, network. There’s all sorts of things that are going on and it was really exciting for me to go, because I’m a patient, I’m not an academic, so having to get to these conferences a little bit harder for me to get there. I was there because I was speaking this year and I have spoken a couple years before.

And yeah, so this was my seventh ACR as well, and I’ve been to a few. They typically take place in a major city throughout the US each year. I’ve been to Washington, Philadelphia, San Diego, Atlanta, and next year is Orlando.

Patients get there through either speaking opportunities, this is usually with a research project or an organization they might be partnered with, and that’s including a sponsorship.

Or sometimes they get a patient perspective submitted and accepted. And these are abstracts and posters that patients can put together. And they get about two hours in the big poster hall to talk to everybody about whatever they decided to write about. I’ve done three one on patient engagement and research support groups and how much I love the sauna.

So it is probably one of my absolute favorite events of the year. And I’m gonna hand it over to Cheryl now to talk about some of the sessions that we did together. 

[00:03:01] Cheryl Crow: Yes. This episode is really gonna focus on what we found, as rheumatoid arthritis patients and as patient educators. We are gonna talk about what we found the most exciting and some of the most buzzworthy, developments.

But first we want to let you know a little bit about the two sessions that the sessions that we spoke on.

So together we spoke on ways to improve patient health literacy. And honestly, that’s the purpose of this podcast and health literacy is just, literacy is being able to understand the spoken and written word, and health literacy is understanding information about your health and healthcare. And we talked a lot about misinformation, ways to help combat that.

And one of the takeaways I found, ’cause I dug really deep into the health psychology research, is that people don’t change their minds when presented with facts, they change their mind when presented with stories and emotions, which is kind of the opposite for me as an occupational therapist, how health providers are trained. We’re trained to be unbiased and not overly emotional and not rely on personal anecdotes. So there was a lot of like paradoxes there that we delved into and that was really great.

And then the second one was a support group technology session where the two big takeaways I would say. One is we really wanted to get a diverse group together. So we had one Latina speaker and one African American speaker, and they talked a lot about how, the importance of support groups for meeting people’s needs with marginalized identities, whether that’s through sexual orientation or through, racial I background.

And we also talked about how technologies like social media can increase your access to populations that might not come to an in-person support group due to many barriers.

The second one, this is a little bit more academic, but from my side, I wanted to look at the research into: are virtual support groups as effective as in-person support groups?

And one thing I found really exciting was that yes they are. So that was very heartening to me as somebody who’s led support groups for rheumatoid arthritis for the last five years and developed, my entire, business is support programs and educational programs. That was awesome.

So, yeah, eileen, why don’t you talk about the one that you did that we weren’t together on. 

[00:05:16] Eileen Davidson: Yeah, so I was invited to speak about patient engagement in research, the best practices. So I really wanted to focus on tokenism and power imbalances, and I gave some personal stories, not just facts but personal stories about how tokenism and power imbalance, when I have been a patient partner in research has affected me as a patient partner in research.

And also personally unfortunately, my talk did get cut short a little bit because we were over time, so I didn’t get to finish it and I worked really hard on it, so that was a bit unfortunate. But it does happen. It just kind of taught me a lesson, make sure we keep on time.

And the other session that I was involved in was on shared decision making with a rheumatologist or two rheumatologists, one from the UK, one from the us and then a Canadian occupational therapist who has developed a, child’s arthritis decision aid, and they were just talking about how shared decision making has helped patients make decisions easier, and it’s helped rheumatologists talk to their patients easier. And how having that visual with, the, the cards that they make or the pamphlets that they make for these aids can help, really help patients kind of conceptualize everything because when they’re being told to start medications, there’s, it’s really overwhelming.

So it was interesting to hear from, I know from my personal experience shared decision making is huge because it gives me the preference of what medications I want, when I wanna take it and things like that. However, I hadn’t really heard from the rheumatologist perspective what the advances were for that.

So yeah, it was, it was really exciting to speak and it’s one of my favorite things to do, and hopefully we’re doing it again next year. 

[00:07:01] Cheryl Crow: Yes, yes. We have some proposals on the works. So, so now we’re gonna go into our biggest takeaways from other people’s sessions. I went to three that have to do with either dietary interventions and- or the microbiome.

Those do go hand in hand ’cause dietary interventions affect your mi microbiome. And if you don’t know, the microbiome is like the series of little bacteria that live in, not just in your stomach, but actually in your entire digestive tract. So from your mouth to your butt, there’s all, all sorts of bacteria in every single stage of the way.

And people with rheumatoid arthritis have alterations in their gut microbiome compared to non arthritis people. The, the problem is, is it causal? We don’t know what causes what, right? But that’s what all these research are trying to figure out. So the first one was Dr. Nisha Ek, who is a integrative rheumatologist in Loma Linda, California.

She spoke on the topic of diet, supplements and stress reduction for rheumatoid arthritis specifically. And if you look into dietary interventions for rheumatoid arthritis, you’ll hear this over and over and over again: a plant focused, Mediterranean style diet with lots of diversity of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, seeds, olive oil, moderate fish and poultry, and avoiding highly processed food, is really what’s recommended over and over again, to help reduce inflammation and support a healthier gut microbiome.

She also did talk about supplements, which is a little bit of a, controversial thing, ’cause the supplements that are marketed specifically for arthritis are not endorsed by the American College of Rheumatology. However, there are general supplements like vitamin D that when you are deficient in them and you have rheumatoid arthritis can be particularly bad.

So she highlighted the importance of making sure you have enough vitamin D, which I know Eileen and I both live in rainy, cold areas, so I do take a vitamin D supplement just, just as a patient testimonial or whatnot. And I do too. Yeah. And also some, she showed some evidence of supplements for like fish oil and turmeric. But they should not and will not replace your prescribed RA treatments as your expectation.

The third thing that she said was managing stress, sleep, and the nervous system is often looked, but also important part of controlling inflammation, which is very, understandable.

The second one I went on that, that looked at nutrition for Rheumatic disease was by Dr. Brian Andonian, who we became the biggest fan girls of. He was a great speaker and he is gonna be on the next episode of the Rheumer has it podcast, so we’re not gonna talk too malt long about his stuff.

But what he taught me that I had never really understood is that rheumatoid arthritis, the disease itself leads to accelerated aging throughout the lifespan. I knew we had a shorter lifespan, but I didn’t know that throughout the whole lifespan it was accelerated. I thought it was maybe just towards the end.

So, that’s the bad news. But the good news is that we can slow that accelerate aging down and prolong our lifespan through exercise, diet, and sleep. So stay tuned to hear more about that.

Last quick one was that the microbiome specific research, the gut microbiome shows that, that your gut microbiome might affect how likely you are to respond well to methotrexate. So people who responded well to methotrexate, which I fall in that category where it helps control my disease, those people had a different gut microbiome profile compared to those who didn’t respond well to methotrexate.

So what is going on there? The scientists don’t know yet. The, the conclusion they made was maybe by altering the gut, gut microbiome in the future, they can predict better, who can benefit from certain RA drugs and possibly improve, treat treatment outcomes.

So that was really exciting. So what, what were, what was one that you really wanted to highlight, Eileen?

[00:10:54] Eileen Davidson: Well, I think the one that I wanna highlight, because I noticed there was more talk on it than usual was mental health and fatigue. And I know that that is also a hot topic for patients.

So this one that really stood out to me was talking about grief and how people with rheumatic diseases are, they do go through grief, especially at the beginning of the diagnosis, but then also throughout their diagnosis. And it’s, they were kind of highlighting how important it’s for rheumatologists to watch for this and refer patients for mental health support. Because when the grief turns chronic and it doesn’t stop, that’s when it turns into depression and that’s when medications are needed more interventions.

So it’s really important for rheumatologists to recognize that rheumatic disease, there’s so many losses and patients will go through all the different stages of grief, the denial, anger, baring, depression, and then hopefully they reach acceptance. And you, it’s really good for rheumatologists to help patients get into the area where they are accepting what’s happening to them.

And I went to one session that was speaking about grief and then how the patients do not get adequate support for mental health, which is interesting ’cause I was actually involved in a study with Arthritis Research Canada on that. And they, who actually a couple times I saw the study was cited. So. It was interesting ’cause that was a Canadian study, but it’s also reflective across the US and I guess among other countries. So it was definitely highlighted that mental health needs more guidance for patients.

But then they also went into about how the benefits of lifestyle medicine can actually really help patients with their mental health. And they were talking about whole food plant predominant nutrition. Again, that was a common theme. I heard throughout the conference sleep was also brought up quite a few times, and then exercise. Exercise was brought up a lot, especially as being the only highly recommended treatment for on the integrated treatment guidelines for rheumatoid arthritis that were released in 2022 by the American College of Rheumatology, and which I was also involved on. Especially seeing how it is to help shape the care for our diseases and how important integrated treatments are.

So. One of the things that there was highlighting was the Plants for Joint Study, which showed significant improvements in pain and function for those living with rheumatoid arthritis and how that helped even reduce some of their medications and that, that was quite interesting.

So I don’t, they, I can’t remember if they went onto like, the mental health medications or if it was anti-inflammatory medications. But as somebody who has to take both medications for our, my rheumatoid arthritis and my mental health, I would love to significantly reduce either of them.

And one thing that they also highlight is the people with rheumatic diseases and depression, they have a stronger chance of having fatigue and having really bad fatigue. Almost like treatment resisted fatigue. And when patients have poor sleep, that’s also another indicator that their fatigue is really bad.

They have more anxiety, they have more depression. And so they were kind of highlighting how symptoms like poor sleep and lack of proper nutrition, lack of physical activity and lack of like mental health support has kind of turned into more poorer outcomes for patients. Mm-hmm. And how that there needs to be interventions outside of just medications.

However, there was one really cool lady who was speaking, she was a psychiatrist and a rheumatologist, and she went through all the medications that are SSRIs or SNRIs that can help patients and how they help them. That was more for the rheumatologists to kind of understand. But it was really interesting to see how she has seen changes in her patient’s inflammation after improving their mental health as well.

And the role that medications do have in that some medications like Celebrex can actually help patients, not just for their mental health, but reduce nerve pain and pain and fibromyalgia. So, that was, I thought that was extremely interesting to me.

So you learned about some new treatments one that’s really, really popular with patients right now.

[00:15:49] Cheryl Crow: Yes. Yes. And I think, a lot of us the, the word, I’ll say this, the word cure is not something that I’ve heard a lot of researchers use until CAR T-cell therapy has come around.

So, CAR T-cell therapy stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. It is something that has been used in cancer for a while, and what it does is, and this is again, you might see, we’ve taught you to not, not listen to words like this, like reboot your immune system when it comes from somebody trying to sell you a supplement. But this actually is literally happening in CAR T-cell therapy.

A lot of the studies have been done in lupus to lead to a deep remission without ongoing steroids or an immunosuppressants. And I interviewed a researcher for my regular podcast, which she’ll, it’ll come out soon, Cayla, and she said, it’s the first time she’s heard lots of rheumatologists using the C word like cure.

And if you remember back when I interviewed the Benaroya Research Institute, the head of that, she said a couple years ago, I said do you think there’s gonna be a cure for rheumatoid arthritis in my lifetime? And she said, I think there’s gonna be a cure for rheumatoid arthritis in the next 15 years.

And I was like, whoa. I had never heard anyone say that before, but now I know she meant CAR T-cell therapy.

Now you are like, okay, this is too good to be true. How do I get it? Because this is an, this is a reboot where you would not need ongoing therapy, not need ongoing medications. It’s like a one and done thing as far as I understand.

However here’s all the disclaimers. A, it’s still experimental, not done on a lot of people with rheumatoid arthritis yet. Obviously there are potential side effects. The traditional CAR T-cell therapy is intense, requires chemo like preparation and close hospital monitoring.

However, there is a new approach that some people were presenting at the conference called Car Tregs, T-R-E-G-S that’s gentler. But again, it’s very early on. You cannot get this therapy anywhere other than a clinical trial and even, and the actual cost of this treatment is, I’m not exaggerating, over half a million dollars.

So that’s the big question, is who’s gonna pay for this? And also it hasn’t been around long enough for us to know the long-term safety implications for it. So it is, again, not something you can get currently, but maybe keep an eye out for it over the next few years. And there actually is a clinical trial enrolling in Seattle, Washington right now. If you’re interested, I can let you know the names of the people doing that.

The second one that could lead to a long-term remission: vagus nerve stimulation therapies vagus nerve modulators. They can lead to a long-term unmedicated remission. However, you still need to have the stimulator on you.

So this is, it’s like getting, it’s like in some ways getting a pacemaker. It’s, it’s, but it’s not in your heart. It’s in, it stimulates your vagus nerve, it’s in your neck. And what it does, it’s the abstract that where this was presented was called “Neuro Immune Modulation for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis Results at 12 months from a randomized sham controlled doubleblind study.”

So it showed that once daily cervical vagus nerve stimulation kept about half of the difficult to treat RA patients, made them go into low disease activity or remission with a safety profile again, more analogous to a pacemaker than to immunosuppressants.

So not only are these medication free treatments, they are immunosuppression free treatments.

The 12 month reset RA data led to FDA approval in July, 2025 of the SetPoint system. Yeah, that’s the first ever neuro immune modulation vagus nerve stimulation device for moderately to severe active RA. So if you’re interested in that we’re gonna put, of course, we’re gonna put links to all these studies in, in the show notes.

So those were like the talk of the town, especially the CAR T cell because it really could lead to a cure. But, the other talk of the town is the one you’re gonna talk about the GLP-1 type meds. 

[00:19:50] Eileen Davidson: Yes. So I think this is probably one of the hottest topics other than CAR T at ACR this year because the research around it is actually starting to sound really promising. And I have been hearing from a lot of patients who have tried GLP-1s, which are glucan like peptide one, that was a mouthful.

So, I’ve also been involved in some research, but it has been as a patient partner, not a patient participant. And that was for rheumatoid arthritis patients with type two diabetes.

And that has shown a great reduction in not just weight, but also their diabetes. So that’s fantastic. But what if they don’t have diabetes? Like ’cause diabetes is a common comorbidity or tag along condition with rheumatoid arthritis.

So what’s a good way to prevent us from getting that? GLP-1s, right? So we wanna know where the research is, and also some of our medications cause weight gain. So how do we get that Prednisone weight gain off? Right? Well, GLP-1s aren’t just showing that they’re good for weight loss. They’re also showing that patients are having better heart health and longer life.

They saw that people with RA or psoriatic arthritis face higher risk of heart disease, but two studies found that patients on GLP-1 drugs had fewer serious cardiovascular problems and lower death rates. In psoriatic arthritis, users had a reduced risk of major heart events and lower overall mortality compared to non-users.

And in rheumatoid arthritis, obese patients without diabetes had an 86% lower risk of death and a 40% lower risk of major cardiovascular events, mainly fewer cases of heart failure if they were on a GLP-1 therapy. And also, I think what we’re wanting to know: does it make us feel better? Well, one study showed that it does show improved joint outcomes with RA in patients already diagnosed with RA.

Those prescribed semiglutide reported fewer joint flares, including less stiffness, swelling, and pain. The benefits appear like within 30 days, and it lasted up to a year. Though this is obviously an area that they need to have more research in, just like the vagus nerve nerve simulations and the CAR T therapies.

So I think that’s some of the information that patients really, really want to know about GLP-1, these are known as Ozempic Wegovy, there’s probably some other brands as well. And when we have research like this, we need to advocate so that it can get covered by insurance, so that it can help support patients who don’t just have type two diabetes, because this is also prevention for major comorbidities of rheumatic diseases.

Like heart disease is a huge one. Hypertension, diabetes, obesity. So yeah, it’s looking really promising. I think this year the highlighting of all these new therapies was probably one of the most exciting parts. Like I’ve been there before, ACR where they’ve had things about exercise, sleep, mental health, which is always exciting.

It’s very validating, but this really brings hope for us patients. 

[00:23:18] Cheryl Crow: Yeah. I was just gonna add that I think the, the thing that’s really exciting about the GLP-1s is that they’re already on the market and they, they don’t have as big of a cost barrier as things like CAR T-Cell.

And they’re not invasive, like they’re, it’s an injection as opposed to, an implant. I mean, I’m pretty chill when it comes to surgeries or medications and stuff, but if, you get near my spinal cord, I’m gonna get a little bit nervous.

And now the one downside I’ll say, as somebody with gastroparesis, I’m like, definitely not a candidate for GLP-1, I have a hard time keeping my weight up as it is. But one of the, the potential cautions that, that people are saying for rheumatoid arthritis specifically is that we are prone to muscle wasting.

And sometimes I don’t know if they understand why or how, but the weight loss is coming from the muscle as well as the fat. And you, I wanna just make sure you’re working to keep your muscle strengthened.

[00:24:10] Eileen Davidson: Yeah. I’ve heard recommendations to make sure you are strength training and to be eating lots of protein.

[00:24:16] Cheryl Crow: Per perfect. . So I’ll keep an eye on that. But yeah, those were definitely, amazing advancements. And I was listening to an interview with a different rheumatologist who after the conference, he made an interesting point. He said, every 20 years around, we tend to have a huge leap in rheumatoid arthritis and rheumatic disease treatment.

In the eighties it was the conventional DMARDs, like methotrexate. And then in the early two thousands it was the biologics, like TNF inhibitors, like Enbrel, Humira. And then the other like IL six inhibitors and all these other meds that we all are, can be on now.

And then now like 20 years later, now we’re having this new era with the cAR T-cell therapy GLP and the vagus nerve stimulation. So, yeah, that’s, I agree with you that having been to the conference numerous times, this was the first one where it was starting to feel like, ooh, we’re getting some excitement here. Like in terms of a brand new, a new era. 

[00:25:05] Eileen Davidson: Yeah. But I was busy during a session that I really wanted to go to. Because I am so happy that this, aside from our session last year was brought up, but you got to see one on cognitive dysfunction, which Yes.

Hasn’t really been talked about a lot. Please tell me about that one. 

[00:25:23] Cheryl Crow: So the first thing I will say is if you feel like you’re having, struggling with your thinking, that you feel this sense of quote unquote “brain fog” or a sense of, I can’t think clearly anymore.

It’s not you, it’s the disease. Like, you’re not just imagining it. It’s amazing how few rheumatologists actually know about this and monitor for it, given how many studies there are that do show, this is a very reliable, predictable phenomenon. I was having a little bit of an existential crisis listening to this, like study after study shows that people with rheumatoid arthritis and similar rheumatic diseases, they did a lot on scleroderma and fibromyalgia as well have cognitive dysfunction, like we perform worse on some tests on cognition.

Now, cognitive function is not just one thing you, when you look at cognitive testing, it’s broken up into many different sub-domains. So one that is shown a lot is short-term memory problems, That’s one. Difficulties with concentration of focus. There can be difficulties with verbal fluency and language problems, difficulties with processing speed. I definitely have the next one, which is decreased executive function. So your executive functions are like the CEO of your brain or like the conductor of the orchestra of all your other higher level functions in your frontal lobes.

So just know that people with RA fibromyalgia and scleroderma consistently show cognitive dysfunction among multiple domains. You’re not alone.

Now, what can you do about it? So, there is a, unfortunately the program that they talked about is not widely available. It’s available only to the people enrolled in this study, but hopefully in the future they wanna make it available.

It’s out of University of Michigan and these researchers, took exercises and activities that are very common in what we call neurore rehabilitation or brain rehabilitation. Now, I learned brain rehabilitation tools as an occupational therapist for things like traumatic brain injuries or strokes, and I think it’s brilliant to say if someone has some cognitive dysfunction, whether it’s from a brain injury or stroke, or let’s say rheumatoid arthritis, let’s use those same techniques.

So there’s really two buckets. There’s, they call ’em cognitive compensatory strategies, which is, okay, let’s, if we can’t fix the underlying cognitive dysfunction, let’s put scaffolds and external things to help the person function better.

So a simple one would be, if you can’t remember, i, let’s say, will you always put a timer on or a reminder on For my medication every single day, I have a reminder. I’m not gonna rely on my memory to, to, to remind me to take the medication. I have to have a reminder. So, technology reminders.

Another one would be, attention strategies would be like breaking complex tasks down into smaller steps, pacing yourself, organizational strategies, and and those are all very common co cognitive compensatory strategies.

What they also did in this study was they looked at brain training games, which there are some that kind of sound kind of scammy out they’re, like, play this game every day and you’re boost your brain.

But actually they did show that with people with scleroderma, that was the focus of this particular study, they did show improvements on their cognitive function, not only on standardized testing, ’cause some of us can still do well on standardized testing, but struggle in everyday life. They also did better on in everyday life when they had participated in this quote unquote brain boost program where again, they were taught cognitive compensatory strategies and they participated in brain training games.

So that was really exciting, like exercise for your brain. But they also, another speaker in this session did speak directly to the role of exercise strength training and cardio in particular on improving cognitive function.

So that is one quick thing you could do today is get your body moving That does improve cognitive functions. So, yeah, that was a really great one. And I, I hope to see more on cognitive function in the future.

There’s another one we wanna make sure, even though neither of us has Sjogren’s, we wanna put a little spotlight on Sjogren’s.

What, what did you learn about that? 

[00:29:29] Eileen Davidson: Well, I think this year when really exciting thing was how prominent Sjogren’s was everywhere. It was on buses, it was on elevators, it was on escalators. There was so much, just awareness around Sjogren’s, and that’s because two major things have happened in the last little while.

One Sjogren’s syndrome is no longer called Sjogren’s syndrome, it’s now Sjogren’s disease. Which is great actually highlights that it is a disease in Sjogren’s syndrome to hopefully taken more serious. And I think it is because now there are actual medications in the works coming out, in the pipeline, medications specifically for Sjogren’s.

And that’s fantastic news. Always when there’s new medications coming out to treat us any rheumatic disease that is exciting. So, yeah. 

[00:30:16] Cheryl Crow: Yeah, 

[00:30:16] Eileen Davidson: that’s the big news about Sjogrens. 

[00:30:19] Cheryl Crow: Yeah. And we mentioned earlier that we’re also gonna talk to Dr. Andonian about this, lifestyle, how nutrition and exercise can help slow down that risk of accelerated aging.

Is there anything else you wanted to say to what their appetite on the, let’s get physical talk.

[00:30:36] Eileen Davidson: Well, it’s really exciting because he had like actual scientific evidence that exercise can help reduce inflammation, helps people even reduce medication, how it’s helped their sleep. All these sorts of wonderful things that exercise is really kind of showing us.

And I’m excited for that and I’m really excited to bring Dr. Andonian on. This podcast because I know whoever listens to this is gonna be as much in love with him as we are because he’s just a fantastic speaker. Yeah, and you could just tell his passion for both physical activity and rheumatology. 

[00:31:16] Cheryl Crow: Yeah, that is, I know we’re a little bit over time, but I have to say that that is one of the best things about the conference. It’s not just the things that we learn. ’cause you can learn those without going to the conference physically, but it’s just being in the presence of these really fantastic researchers, seeing people that are so passionate.

I had a doctor from Oregon who stopped me after our talk on health literacy. And he was working on a model, he wanted to just pick my brain as a patient and, and as an OT and a patient educator. It was really, really creative and just feeling that energy and feeling the excitement is, is really great.

So anyway, onto our takeaways. So in one sentence, what’s the most important takeaway we want people to take from this episode? I would say that better treatments are on the near horizon for rheumatoid arthritis that are less immunosuppressive than our current therapies, which is really, really exciting.

What would you say?

[00:32:10] Eileen Davidson: I would say that symptoms, basically going back to our session last year of it’s not just joint pain. Those symptoms, that’s extracurricular symptoms of rheumatic diseases are really starting to get noticed and they’re really starting to have studies involved and hopefully solutions for us.

[00:32:29] Cheryl Crow: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you all again for listening to another episode of Rheumer Has It. Don’t forget to check the show notes for for a full transcript and especially for this episode, links to everything that we discussed. You can get that@www.my arthritis life.net. 

[00:32:49] Eileen Davidson: Awesome. And we would also love to hear what you think about this episode, what you would like to hear again, or any topics you want us to cover.

So send us an email or a comment on our social media accounts. Thanks so much. Bye-bye for now.

 

Add comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *