Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients

Sleath is also coprincipal investigator and site principal investigator on a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Aging. The project reunites Sleath with a familiar face from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Sleath earned her doctorate. Betty Chewning, a UW School of Pharmacy professor who was on Sleath’s dissertation committee, approached Sleath about designing a study on how communication between rheumatologists and rheumatoid arthritis patients impact medication use.

“That was a great example of team work because that was a $2 million grant,” says Sleath, who also collaborated with Chewning on a paper while completing her doctorate. “It’s hard doing research in two states, but it worked well because we knew each other well.”

The study investigates whether it would help communication to have patients answer questions about their medication and quality of life before they see a physician. While waiting to see their rheumatologists, rheumatoid arthritis patients are given handheld computers with questions. The control group answered questions about exercise and diet, while the experimental group answered questions about medication and quality of life. Both the doctor and the patient receive a printout of the answers before they see each other. Researchers then code audio recordings of the visits to gauge the effectiveness of the communication.

“It’s thought that by asking the patients, getting them to think about it, and giving them a printout of their answers and giving the doctor a printout of the answers, that might lead to better communication and the patients will do better,” Sleath says.

Sleath is currently collecting and analyzing data at the study’s four-year mark. The investigation has already yielded one paper that is under review, which looks at communication about depression in rheumatoid arthritis patients.

“We screened people to see if they have symptoms of depression, and of those people that screened as having moderate to severe symptoms of depression, did they talk about it with their providers,” says Sleath, who has a strong interest in mental health and works with the mental health and aging research groups at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

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