Epidemiology of inflammatory rheumatic diseases

Kronične upalne nezarazne bolesti postaju tema središnjeg javnozdravstvenog interesa. Produljenje očekivanog životnog vijeka bolesnika zahvaljujući boljoj dijagnostici te boljoj i djelotvornijoj terapiji rezultiralo je povećanjem broja bolesnika s kroničnih upalnim reumatskim bolestima u populaciji. Svako ozbiljnije promišljanje o nekom zdravstvenom problemu zahtijeva primjerenu epidemiološku analizu. U tekstu je ukratko prikazana problematika deskriptivnih i analitičkih epidemioloških studija. Ukratko su spomenuti rezultati hrvatskih epidemioloških studija upalnih reumatskih bolesti u posljednjih desetak godina.Chronic inflammatory rheumatic diseases are becoming one of the central problems of public health services. Prolongation of expected life span due to better diagnostics and better and more efficacious therapeutic procedures resulted in increasing number of patients with chronic inflammatory diseases in population. Any serious consideration about health problem must include adequate epidemiologic analysis. This text briefly covers the problems of descriptive and analytic epidemiological studies and shortly addresses results of Croatian epidemiological studies of inflammatory rheumatic diseases in the last ten years

Nova klasifikacija vaskulitisa [New classification of vasculitis]

Vasculitis syndrome comprises a heterogenic group of inflammatory rheumatic diseases whose common feature is inflammation in the blood vessel wall. Establishing the diagnosis of vasculitis is one of the greatest challenges in medicine. Clinical presentation of vasculitis depends on the extent of an organ system affection, as well as on the total number of affected organs. A great range of clinical presentations of vasculitis and the low incidence of the disease impede systematic clinical investigation of vasculitis. The needs of clinical routine and the need for conducting systemic clinical investigations require a clear distinction of individual clinical entities. Different classifications of vasculitis syndrome have been proposed: according to etiology, pathogenesis, histological finding in the affected vessels, affection of individual organs and organ systems. This paper presents and comments news and recent classifications and nomenclature of vasculitic entities proposed at the second conference in Chapel Hill