Word: rheumatoid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Relieving rheumatoid arthritis...
...Adele Lojko, 59, the eight steps leading from the sidewalk to the front door of her suburban Boston home were a barrier as forbidding as the Great Wall of China. Often confined to a wheelchair with severe rheumatoid arthritis, she had to be carried up and down the steps. But now, after many years of needing assistance whenever she came or left, Mrs. Lojko proudly navigates that once insurmountable hurdle by herself, needing only a cane...
...Lojko is one of ten Boston and eleven San Francisco-area rheumatoid arthritis patients treated with a new program of radiation therapy that has produced promising results in relieving both pain and stiffness from this sometimes crippling disease. Radiation therapy is one of the standard treatments for Hodgkin's disease and other cancers of the lymph nodes; in the past 25 years, it has helped raise the cure rate for Hodgkin's disease from 30% to 80%. While refining their techniques, Hodgkin's researchers noticed that irradiation also seemed to relieve arthritis in laboratory animals. Stanford University...
...studies published in yesterday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by doctors from Stanford and Harvard Medical Schools report that doses of radiation reduce pain and swelling in patients with rheumatoid arthritis...
Radiation, which has been used for 20 years to treat cancer of the lymph nodes, only kills the T lymphosite cells. Because patients benefitted from the radiation therapy, the doctors concluded that T lymphosite cells provoke inflamation in rheumatoid arthritis, Trentham said...