German Rheumatism Research Centre

OsteoCHAT: real-world patient evaluation and benchmarking of a guideline-grounded osteoporosis chatbot

Patients with osteoporosis have information needs that routine care inconsistently addresses. In this multicenter real-world evaluation, the LLM-based, guideline-grounded chatbot OsteoCHAT showed high participant acceptability and achieved expert-rated answer quality comparable t...

Outcomes in JIA have greatly improved, but we can still do better

Abstract Outcomes for children and adolescents with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) have improved substantially over the past two decades, driven by biologic and targeted synthetic DMARDs, treat-to-target strategies with regular standardized assessments, and multidisciplinary...

Imputing longitudinal PROM data at the item and score level in clinical trials

Abstract Background Missing data in patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) can affect estimation accuracy and inferential validity, particularly under missing-at-random (MAR) mechanisms. Multiple imputation (MI) is commonly recommended, but the relative performance of item-lev...

Agranulocytosis associated with metamizole among EudraVigilance reports involving methotrexate for rheumatoid arthritis

Methotrexate (MTX) can induce adverse drug reactions (ADRs) including severe haematotoxic events. This study analyses whether agranulocytosis is disproportionately reported in spontaneous reports involving MTX for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) when use of metamizole, a non-opioid ana...

Effect of apremilast on entheseal bone damage in psoriasis patients at risk of developing psoriatic arthritis - data from the prospective, interventional EPOS study

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: A subset of psoriasis (PsO) patients exhibits subclinical entheseal inflammation and bone remodeling placing them at higher risk of developing psoriatic arthritis (PsA). Whether early pharmacological interventions during this phase can modulate these inflammat...

Elucidating the Impact of Bacterial Composition and Diversity on Skin Homeostasis Using a Human 3D In Vitro Skin Model

The importance of the skin microbiome in human health has become increasingly evident. Despite considerable advancements, complex host–microbe interactions remain largely unexplored, primarily due to a paucity of models mimicking human skin and maintaining bacterial diversity in...