Birmingham specialist awarded funding to help women with life-threatening form of arthritis
Women who suffer from a life-threatening form of arthritis that mimics the symptoms of many other diseases are set to benefit from a major research grant awarded to a Birmingham specialist.
Lupus is a serious inflammatory condition that affects mainly women of childbearing age, causing joint pain and skin rashes and also affecting internal organs such as the heart, lungs and kidneys. As in most inflammatory conditions, it can flare up and become "active", leading to a worsening of symptoms.
Now the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc) has awarded a three-year clinical research fellowship of £176,4000 to Dr Chee-Seng Yee, a specialist registrar in rheumatology at the University of Birmingham and the City Hospital, to develop a new method of accurately measuring disease activity in lupus. An improved combination of questions, examination and blood tests will help clinicians to pinpoint precise symptoms, leading to better treatment and management of the condition.
"Lupus is a complex multi-system disease which affects predominantly young women in their prime of life," explained Dr Yee. "Managing the disease involves the use of steroids and other drugs to suppress the immune system, which have many potential serious side effects. Therefore the ability to assess disease activity is crucial in the management of lupus, and to date there is no single laboratory test sufficiently adequate to measure it."
Dr Yee is to update an existing disease activity tool which has been used for the past 20 years, well before many of the current, more effective treatments for lupus were developed, and before two important aspects of lupus were fully understood – pregnancy, and gastro-intestinal involvement.
Not so long ago, lupus was a life-threatening disease and women were often advised against pregnancy, because those who attempted to have a baby often became seriously ill, and there was a high risk of miscarriage and stillbirth. Now many more women are surviving longer and having successful pregnancies.
Dr Yee will be supervised by Dr Caroline Gordon who holds regular lupus clinics at the City Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, which sees more than 300 patients from the West Midlands every year. Birmingham is a leading centre of research funded by the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc), the fourth largest medical research charity in the UK.
