At LUPUS EUROPE, we do care about your data and your privacy. We do this through limiting the amount of information we collect and retain to the strict minimum to comply with legal and regulatory requirements and to enable us to serve you at best.

Website and Blog purpose:

LUPUS EUROPE’s website and blog presents the activities of the organisation and aims to provide free information for our member groups, people living with lupus, their relatives and friends.  LUPUS EUROPE’s  website and blog provides information to help capacity building and to keep visitors up to date with the most current developments in the lupus area, and to link them with other trustable sites providing such information.

Confidentiality of Website collected information:

Any information such as email addresses, telephone numbers and other related contact details that is collected through our website is kept strictly confidential and will not be shared with any third parties, unless required by law. Any information used is solely for the purpose of our own statistics. We do NOT keep sensitive information such as age, gender, whether you are a lupus patient or a family/friend, …. We do not give, transmit or sell any of our data to anyone, and do our best to keep your data confidential. 

LUPUS EUROPE Address database:

If you register to receive information from us by e-mail, we will keep the information collected in a mailing software (currently Mailchimp). This data collected is limited to the data we need to send you in a friendly way the most appropriate news : name and address, email, phone number, organisation and role,… You can limit further this information, unsubscribe or adjust any incorrect data at any time with the link  we attach to our mailing or by sending a request to secretariat@lupus-europe.org.

Transparency of Funding:

This website has been designed Pro Bono by Setfire a web design company that is not otherwise involved in LUPUS EUROPE’s activities. Our Web and blog on going operation costs (such as domain name registration, hosting etc.), as part of our operational activities, are funded by unrestricted grants from sponsors in line with our code of ethics and funding framework. Our website does not host any form of advertisement.

Editorial Content:

The editorial content of this website is managed and Controlled by LUPUS EUROPE’s Board of trustees. Most authors of this website are not medical doctors.  Any supplementary content that may be added which has been written by a medical doctor will be clearly stated.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Additional information

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

We do segregate the issuance of mailing or information based on the preferences you have indicated in your profile, as well as based on the type of relation we have with you (as a member delegate, an industry partner, a health care professional, or a friend, for example). Aside from this simple sorting, we do not perform any type of profiling using the data you have provided us or that has been collected as mentioned above

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🤩 #EULAR2026 has been a blast!

Now it’s time to look back at some of the key lupus-related insights, data and messages from this year’s Congress.

Join Lupus Europe for our EULAR 2026 recap webinar:

📅 June 15
🕖 19:00 CET
📍 Zoom

✅ Register by sending an email to [secretariat@lupus-europe.org](mailto:secretariat@lupus-europe.org)

Don’t miss it!
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🤩 #EULAR2026 has

🦋 EULAR started yesterday!

This year, #EULAR2026 brings together a huge rheumatology community:

📊 5,705 abstracts submitted from 102 countries, a new EULAR record
📊 187 scientific sessions across 15 tracks
📊 More than 350 distinguished speakers from 43 nations

And Lupus Europe is here!

As promised, some of our PAN members are covering lupus-related sessions to bring key messages back to the lupus community.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 One of yesterday’s highlights was seeing Marina Pietri present our poster on Sex & Lupus co-creation, with Rita Vieira also there representing the Youth Group’s work. The poster shows how young people with lupus worked with a clinician to create a safe, respectful space to talk about sex, intimacy and lupus, topics that are still too often left out of routine care.

A big thank you to Dr Cristiana Sieiro Santos for her support and collaboration in making this work possible.

🎥 If you haven’t watched the webinar yet, visit our YouTube channel and watch it there.

🧠 We also followed a session on fatigue, one of the symptoms people with lupus most often report as difficult to explain, measure and manage. The session looked at when tiredness becomes pathological, how fatigue can be assessed, and why lifestyle advice needs to be realistic and adapted to each person.

💬 Patient-doctor communication was another key topic yesterday. Have you heard about the Lupus Consultation Cards? Inspired by the work of NVLE in collaboration with ERN ReCONNET, they are a simple tool to help people prepare for appointments, organise symptoms and questions, and focus the conversation on what matters most. This is the idea behind our #MakeItCount campaign.

🌍 Dr Daniel Guimarães de Oliveira presented a poster on social determinants of health in lupus care, co-authored with our General Secretary Zoe Karakikla Mitsakou. This work shows how healthcare professionals, Patient Research Partners from Lupus Europe, local patient volunteers and social workers co-designed a practical framework to identify barriers such as financial pressure, health literacy, transport, social support and access to care, and connect them with local solutions.

📱 Digital tools were also part of yesterday’s programme, with discussions on how technology can support self-management, shared decision-making and patient empowerment. For Lupus Europe, this strongly connects with our work on reliable, patient-centred digital information, including #LupusGPT and #EasyLupus.

🔬 We also followed the session “The mitochondria: a new culprit for autoimmune diseases?”. The discussion explored how mitochondrial DNA and RNA may act as danger signals, activating immune pathways such as interferon responses and contributing to inflammation in lupus and other autoimmune diseases.

👏 Kudos to our PAN members and Board members for their great job on this first day of EULAR!

🦋 Stay tuned. Today will be another big day for Lupus Europe at #EULAR2026!

Our Chair, Jeanette Andersen, will speak in the session on non-pharmacological interventions to improve quality of life.

We also have a Meet the EULAR Expert session on “AI as a Partner in Care: Empowering the RMD Community with Information”, focusing on AI tools such as #LupusGPT and #EasyLupus, which will be delivered by Zoe Karakikla Mitsakou.
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☀️ Good morning from beautiful London!

#Eular2026 is here, and so are we‼️

💬 You may already know #lupusgpt. You may have read the paper in The Lancet Rheumatology. You may have tried the tool, shared it with a patient, or recommended it to a colleague.

📊 But there is more. More to do. More lessons learned from two years of building something genuinely patient-led. More to understand about what happens when patients, clinicians, and AI specialists work together from the very first question.

🦋 This week, we will be sharing it all.

#lupusgpt: more than you think. Further than you imagined.
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☀️ Good morning

📅 Tomorrow, the EULAR Congress begins!

🌍 #Eular2026 starts tomorrow, and Lupus Europe will be there!

🦋 We will be representing the patient voice, following the latest research, and sharing key updates with our community throughout the week.

Stay tuned for live updates, session highlights, and much more.

💬 Will you be following the congress? Let us know in the comments!
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📅 Tomorrow, the E