Hello and Welcome! First and foremost thanks to all of you who by participating in NDB research advance knowledge of arthritis and arthritis treatment.
Like 2003, this year is proving to be a very busy and exciting time for NDB research as we take our first steps into the International arthritis community. Our questionnaires have been translated into Spanish, French and Portuguese. In addition, we currently have active projects in Portugal with others starting in Brazil, Argentina, and Germany within the next year, and we've collaborated with other arthritis researchers from Canada, England, Norway, Belgium and France.
We are also becoming more active in presenting NDB results internationally. Last fall your data contributed to several research presentations for the 2003 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Annual Scientific Meeting where 23 different countries were represented. In June, you contributed to 8 research presentations for the 2004 European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) annual meeting held in Berlin Germany. Researchers and doctors from around the world attended this meeting.
EULAR and the ACR annual meetings are the two largest venues for arthritis research worldwide, and most researchers attend both. In recent years EULAR has grown rapidly as Europe unified into a common European Union (EU). In some respects European arthritis research has been outpacing the research in the US. Paul Emory's research group in Leeds, England pioneered new methods of arthritis evaluation using ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and then went on to test new treatments plans in rheumatoid arthritis. Ravinder Maini, in England, was the developer of Remicade (infliximab). In the Netherlands Ferdinand Breedveld (Leiden) and Maarten Boers (Amsterdam) tested new and aggressive treatments for RA. This research has resulted in changes to the way rheumatologists all over the world now treat rheumatoid arthritis. Now US and European researchers work in parallel on the development of new drugs and other arthritis treatments.
The kind of research work that we do here at the NDB is also being done in Europe. Databases from groups of patients working with Dr. Alan Silman and Dr. Anthony Woolf in the United Kingdom, Dr. Angela Zink in Germany, Dr. Tore Kvien in Norway, Dr. Lars Klareskog in Sweden and Dr. Piet van Riel in the Netherlands parallels the work we do here. Unlike the US, European researchers have a large advantage: generally their governments support database research and allow linking of databases which allows researches to have more detailed information available to them. Current regulations in the US do not support this level of data sharing, and at this time the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has not shown much interest in supporting this type of research.
The world has been made a lot smaller by the Internet and allows us to collaborate with other researchers regardless of where we live. We are excited about our collaborations with researchers in Europe and South America. This month the NDB will be expanding our Internet questionnaires to include people with arthritis all over the world. So it is a small world after all.
P.S., Our Web pages will have copies of the NDB EULAR presentations for those of you who are interested. If you want more information about the EULAR meeting go to www.eular.org. For abstracts of the research that was presented try www.eular.org/eular2004/index.cfm