Rationale (English)

The chance to achieve the clinical remission in patients affected with Rheumatoid Arthritis, Spondyloarthritis, and Psoriatic Arthritis is opening a new scenario for the management of these diseases in terms of biological activity and immunological response. The current challenge for the rheumatologists is understanding whether the disease remission can be also drug-free.

The current knowledge of the new drugs arrived onto the market modulating IL-23/IL-17/IL-22 pathways or JAK/STAT intracellular signaling is mostly based on the randomized clinical trials, but needs to be corroborated into the real-world. In these settings, some national registries have already collected meaningful data that deserve to be analyzed. A further critical point to focus on is the burden of comorbidities, such as metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, which may impact on the disease course but also be influenced by treatments.

Finally, Polymyalgia Rheumatica is a frequent elderly inflammatory disease that has been neglected in the last years and needs to be focused in light of the new insights into his pathogenesis.

The educational aims of this Congress are:

• Understanding the prognostic factors useful to predict the achievement of clinical and biologic remission in Rheumatoid Arthritis
• Focusing on lung involvement in Rheumatoid Arthritis
• Exploring the novel biologic pathways involved in the pathogenesis of Psoriatic Arthritis and Spondyloarthritis
• Assessing the burden of comorbidities in rheumatic disease and the influence of new therapies
• Assessing the efficacy of new therapeutic strategies of polymyalgia rheumatica
• Exploring the new data emerging from national biologic registers