🦋 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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Alain Cornet
