Lupus: A Patient Care Guide for Nurses and Other Health Professionals is an update of Lupus Erythematosus: Handbook for Nurses by Terri Nass, RN, which provided health care professionals with a comprehensive and detailed review of lupus.

The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) is pleased to have had the opportunity to update the Handbook with the gracious permission of Ms. Nass. Lupus erythematosus is a complex and challenging disease that affects the lives of many thousands of individuals and their families.

With physical, emotional, and psychosocial aspects, this disease requires multidimensional and patient-centered treatment and support strategies.

This comprehensive guide brings together information on a wide variety of issues that health professionals need to know about in order to provide these treatment and support strategies for their patients with lupus.

The guide covers general background on lupus, new advances in research, laboratory tests used to diagnose and evaluate lupus, care of the lupus patient, medications used to treat lupus, psychosocial aspects of lupus, and patient education and information.

A key element of the guide is that it contains information useful to the whole patient care team: nurses, physicians, physical and occupational therapists, social workers, and patients themselves. Many people worked on this revision to incorporate the immense knowledge obtained over recent years on lupus and its management and to create a readerfriendly and useful book.

We wish to thank all those who have played a role in bringing this guide to fruition, in particular the Task Force on Lupus in High Risk Populations, which was led for a time by Lawrence E. Shulman, MD, PhD, the founding director of NIAMS, and which contributed much to ensuring that lupus remains in the public eye and on the research docket.

We also appreciate the National Institute of Nursing Research, NIH, for their comments on and support of the Lupus Guide. We thank the NIH's Office of Research on Women's Health and Office of Research on Minority Health (now the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities) for having participated in the lupus task force and for their generous support of the Lupus Guide and of our work in lupus and other research areas of mutual interest. We appreciate the active role of the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA) in the task force.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the efforts of Jill Buyon, M.D., of NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases; Michelle Petri, M.D., M.P.H., of Johns Hopkins University; and Dennis Gregory, M.D., Michael Ward, M.D., and Cheryl Yarboro, R.N., all of NIAMS, in reviewing the content of this revision.

We hope that nurses and other health professionals across the country will find this new guide informative and useful as they work with people with lupus and their families.





Source: National Institutes of Health, U.S.Dept of Health and Human Services