Spondyloarthropathy historical perspective

Historical perspective

The first clinical description of AS is credited to Bernard Conner (1666 – 1698), an Irish physician who did this in his medical thesis. At early 1690s, Bernard Connor discovered fortuitously one specimen of a fused spine and thorax, which is now recognized as the skeleton with incontrovertible AS changes .The previous history has been developed according to Bywaters in to five stages from the ‘fossil’ stage (1693–1824) over the clinical description (1824–1885) to the clinical and pathological correlations (1884 – 1898), radiological ‘penetration’ and ‘insight’ (1897 – 1931), and finally epidemiology and family studies (1936–1950).

Till 1950s, RA was considered as s nonspecific syndrome that could be triggered off by various diverse etiological factors such as urethritis, psoriasis, and ulcerative colitis.

As early as 1954, the French rheumatologist Jean Marche for the first time suggested that AS and Reiter’s syndrome are two aspects of the same disease.

Oates in 1959 also questioned if AS and Reiter’s syndrome may have the same origin.

Bernard Amor in 1968 further advanced the view of the inter-relationship of this two entities reviewing reports on endemic Reiter’s syndrome with the frequent outcome as AS and a postulated common genetic background.

Finally, from the study on psoriatic arthritis and other work on seronegative arthritis Moll et al. formulated the pivotal

unified concept of a group of seronegative arthritides termed spondarthritides closely interlinked by clinical, serological, radiological, and genetic features. The evi- dence for lumping together a group of diseases derived from clinical associations, familial aggregation, and epidemiological studies.