Abstract
The diagnosis of pauciarticular or polyarticular rheumatic disease in the elderly is frequently a difficult task for a physician. The absence of a single decisive test for the majority of rheumatic conditions creates a situation where a puzzle of final diagnosis is collected from many details, obtained from the patient’s history, physical examination and critical analysis of laboratory data and imaging. Not uncommonly an older person presents with clinical, laboratory, and imaging features typical of two or even more unrelated articular diseases simultaneously. On the other hand, some rheumatic conditions can have atypical presentations in this specific cohort or, sometimes, distinct disorders can have a substantially similar clinical appearance and imaging features in particular joints. This diversity of possible combinations and presentations of rheumatic disorders in the elderly leads oftentimes to the diagnostic conundrum, where the success to diagnose the disease timely depends on both the critical analysis of clinical features, such as disease chronology or patterns of joint involvement, as well as the deliberated interpretation of the laboratory and imaging data.
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Slobodin, G. (2020). Approach to a Geriatric Patient with Pauciarticular and Polyarticular Rheumatic Disease. In: Slobodin, G., Shoenfeld, Y. (eds) Rheumatic Disease in Geriatrics . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44234-7_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44234-7_26
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