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Call for Papers

Topic: Registries in rheumatological and musculoskeletal conditions
Guest Editors:
Dr Roy Fleischmann, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas
Professor David Isenberg, University College London
Professor Ulf Müeller-Ladner, Justus-Liebig University Giessen

Rheumatology plans to publish a themed issue dedicated to registries. The aim of this issue is to collate one collective issue of reviews and to invite the contribution of original research that will add to this area of basic and clinical investigation.

Valid and reliable information about the incidence, prevalence and the disease duration of rheumatological or musculoskeletal conditions require an in-depth knowledge about its pathophysiology. In addition, a large number of patients in all phases and with all stages of disease severity are being studied or treated, and hence need to be assessed. Local, national and international registries are the key tool to address the needs of clinicians and their patients. The biometric design and data acquisition of registries are extremely challenging and require expertise as well as dedication and patience. Funding of these registries is expensive and if established by individual pharmaceutical companies, there can also be concerns about potential bias of the results. However, several excellent registries have been created in the past decades in rheumatology, which have not only provided answers to recognised yet unsolved problems but are also designed to anticipate new questions and challenges that lie ahead.

The editorial in the November issue gives further details about the focus of the themed issue. Click here to read it free online.

Preliminary topics of invited review articles related to this topic include:

1. Problems and solutions of the design of registries
2. Biometric and logistic pitfalls and the respective escape strategies
3. Funding of Registries: options are the US vs. EU and pharmaceutical vs. non-pharmaceutical
4. Single centre or area registries addressing various rheumatologic diseases (e.g. Mayo cohort)
5. Multinational registries on a rare disease (e.g. EUSTAR)
6. Multinational registries on a group of diseases (e.g. vasculitis registry)
7. National Registry for treatment/treatment effects (e.g. RABBIT)
8. International or national registry on long-term treatment side effects
9. How registers can work together effectively to increase our knowledge
10. Linking with other disease registers to assess complications and overlaps of musculoskeletal diseases
11. Strengths and weaknesses of individual registries (e.g. the National Database [Wolfe], CORRONA [Kremer], and the British, Swedish, German, French and Spanish Registries for biologics)

We invite you to contribute original manuscripts to this upcoming themed issue. When submitting your manuscript online, please mention ‘Themed issue 2010’ in your cover letter and title of the manuscript. For example, Themed issue 2010: measuring the severity of disease activity score. All manuscripts should be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rheumatology and will undergo peer review as normal (average time to first decision is 27 days). Manuscripts once accepted will be published online and given a DOI. All manuscripts that are unable to meet the revision deadline or need more rounds of revisions will be considered for the normal issue of the Journal.

Deadline for submission of manuscripts: 1 April 2010
Deadline for first revision: 6 July 2010
Expected issue date: 1 January 2011