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medwireNews: Results of a pilot study suggest that a radiographic scoring system may be able to distinguish patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) from those with nodal osteoarthritis (OA).
Differentiating between the two conditions “is a dilemma that is faced every couple of weeks” in clinical practice, said Sardar Bahadur (Guys and St Thomas' NHS Trust, London, UK), who presented the results at the 2018 British Society for Rheumatology Annual Conference in Liverpool, UK.
He explained that the scoring system was based on hand X-rays – which are “cheap, accurate, and accessible to everyone” – and accounted for features including soft tissue changes, joint erosion, and new bone formation.
Using the scoring system to analyze X-ray sets from 99 patients, a radiologist who was blinded to the clinical diagnosis correctly identified the diagnosis of PsA or OA on 100% of occasions.
Moreover, after a 1-hour tutorial on interpreting X-rays, trainees in rheumatology and radiology were able to correctly distinguish PsA from OA on 67–88% of occasions, suggesting that the system may be “usable by non-radiologists,” said Bahadur.
He concluded that the results of this single-center study now require validation in a larger group of patients.
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