Johannes Fischer

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is currently the most accepted term to describe various types of chronic arthritis in children. By the second half of the nineteenth century, science was beginning to move and Sir Georg Frederic Still and Mayer S. Diamantberger were the first pediatricians who characterized chronic arthritis in children and its progressive destruction (1,2). Until now the etiology and pathogenesis of juvenile idiopathic arthritis is complex and not completely understood. My project is tight connected with The Norwegian JIA Study (NorJIA) (http://norjia.com/index.html) , a prospective, observational multicenter study of children with JIA and healthy controls (for oral issues only), attending the university clinics in Bergen, Tromsø and Trondheim. There will be a special focus on the temporomandibular joints (TMJs) with extensive imaging (MRI 3Tesla, ultrasound, OPG, CEPH, Bitewings and CBCT) and clinical examination, aiming at establishing scoring systems for active and chronic disease.

The overall goal of my study is to explore correlations between clinical pain and diagnostic imaging markers of children and adolescence with JIA and to find diagnostic tools for early detection of children/adolescence that have temporomandibular joint (TMJ) involvements and to develop a multidisciplinary investigation method to avoid under- diagnosing and under- treatment. The supervisors for the Phd project are main supervisor Annika Rosén, Professor and specialist in Oral and Maxillofacial surgery; co-supervisor Marit Slåttelid Skeie, Professor and specialist in Pedodontics and co-supervisor Karen Rosendahl, Professor and specialist in Radiology and head of the Multicenterstudy NORJIA.

1.          Still GF. On a form of chronic joint disease in children. 1896. Clin Orthop Relat Res [Internet]. 1990;(259):4–10. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2208872

2.          Kaiser H. [Mayer S. Diamantberger (1864-1944). The first person to describe juvenile chronic arthritis]. Z Rheumatol [Internet]. 2009;68(3):264–6, 268–70. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19288119