New Guidelines for Treating Ankylosing Spondylitis

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis podcast. My name is Jayson Sacco and I thought we would cover today some new best practices for rheumatologists in working with Ankylosing Spondylitis patients.

Now these are updates that came about from the annual rheumatologist meeting that was held earlier this year. These are the guidelines from the American College of Rheumatology, the Spondylitis Association of America and the Spondyloarthritis Research and Treatment Network and they've updated their guidelines on the management of Ankylosing Spondylitis and Nonradiographic Axial Spondyloarthritis.

First I want to touch on the question of the week. This one was kind of interesting. I saw a young lady post something on Living with Ankylosing Spondylitis on Facebook that she was having rib pain and was mentioning that to her rheumatologist, and they said that they thought it was unrelated to AS and there really wasn't anything that they could do for that rib pain. I started Looking through it I personally know rib pain can be an issue where your ribs attached to your spine, and also where the ribs come together at the front of your chest. Those areas are prone to inflammation and then again are prone to fusing. Everybody's going to get a different some people may have a lot of pressure and pain in the ribs. Others may have very little I've been lucky to have very little but I have had it and I know it's painful in the show notes. I'm going to have a link this was from posting I found from the UK Ankylosing Spondylitis Association, and they talk about good as your ribs can become a flame, the ribs can become a flame, you know, like I said, where they attach with the spine, and that can lead to stiffness and eventually fusion. If you have a doctor that's telling, you, ribs aren't generally affected or anything of that nature. You know, just a quick Google of rib pain and Ankylosing Spondylitis will bring you a number of articles. So remember that they can be affected One of the things you can do as a patient is make sure you're doing a lot of deep breathing. You're doing exercises to keep your ribs flexible, and even when it hurts. Keep doing that deep breathing. If you're doing swimming, it helps lightweight exercises, nothing heavy. You're not trying to build huge muscles. You're just trying to keep all that stuff around your rib cage fluid. The more you exercise your ribs, like anything else that deals with Ankylosing Spondylitis, the better off you'll be. So again, in the show notes, I'll have a link to this and you can read it. It's real short couple paragraphs long.

With that, let's go on to some of the new guidelines for treating Ankylosing Spondylitis. The last time these were updated, actually drafted was 2015. In that four-year time period, quite a bit has changed, you know, a lot more information’s become available about the diagnosis and then just treatments evolved. There's more biologics that are available now and something to point out in here that I was kind of wondering about seems like they're actually starting to look at as well, these guidelines will be in the show notes (at end of this), I'll have links to these articles. These guidelines help to ensure that rheumatologists, healthcare professionals have current knowledge across the board about what are best practices for treating somebody with AS.

There was 86 recommendations, we're not going to go over all 86 of them. There are really a few that I think are the real important, but again, the article I have links to those so you can go out and research them. They were again disseminated to rheumatologists but not only were disseminated by but we're coming together by the American College of Rheumatology, Spondylitis Association of America and like I said before the Spondyloarthritis Research and Treatment Network, really what they're trying to do is if they can get everybody kind of...