The Canadian Inflammatory Myopathy Study: a network to advance research, training, and knowledge translation in inflammatory muscle disease.
CIMS by the numbers
01: Jewish General Hospital (JGH), Montreal, QC
02: McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), Montreal, QC
03: Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Laval (CHUL), Quebec City, QC
07: Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM), Montreal, QC
08: Mary Pack Arthritis Centre / University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Our Strengths
The strengths of this study include:
1) a prospective, longitudinal and multi-centered inception cohort of patients with autoimmune myopathies,
2) a multi-disciplinary team with experts from a wide variety of disciplines, including pathology, respirology, radiology, and biostatistics
3) the participation of basic scientists to pursue translational opportunities,
4) the commitment to building capacity by training highly qualified professionals, and
5) well-developed relationships with patient organizations to help fix research priorities and disseminating knowledge.
Patients eligible for CIMS are all consecutive incident patients with an inflammatory myopathy who are > 18 years of age, fluent in either English or French, likely to comply with the study protocol, and have provided informed consent to participate in the study. A patient is considered to have incident disease provided that he/she is approximately within 3 years of onset of the first symptoms thought to be related to the inflammatory myopathy. For the purposes of this study, the gold standard for the diagnosis of inflammatory myopathy is the recruiting physician, whether the patient meets any specific classification criteria for inflammatory myopathy or not. This can include patients with polymyositis, dermatomyositis, overlap myositis, inclusion body myositis and immune mediated necrotizing myositis. In addition, patients with features of, or overlap with, another autoimmune disease are eligible, provided they are also diagnosed with an inflammatory myopathy by the recruiting physician.
The data collection protocol of CIMS was developed after extensive review of literature and several face-to-face meetings. It includes a number of forms developed by the International Myositis Assessment and Clinical Studies (IMACs) at the NIH and freely available to researchers worldwide, to enhance opportunities for international research collaboration.