Young rheumatologist Dr Anna Kermond returns from Japan with fresh ideas, as the 2025 congress marks new milestones for collaboration and engagement.
As the Australian Young Rheumatologist Ambassador for APLAR (Asia Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology), Dr Anna Kermond is actively working to expand professional engagement among the new breed of rheumatologists.
Dr Kermond has just returned from APLAR’s annual conference, held earlier this month in Fukuoka, Japan.
The APLAR 2025 Congress united leading experts from Japan, alongside international and regional specialists, to share world-class research and the latest developments in science and medicine.
Centred on the theme “Go beyond with harmony,” the scientific program highlighted innovation and collaboration across the spectrum of the specialty.
For the first time, the congress will also feature an expanded concurrent program, reflecting the rapid growth of the APLAR SIG community and the strong response of high-quality abstract submissions – which helped make it one of the best-attended meetings in APLAR’s history.
“This was my second year as the APLAR Young Rheumatologist Australian Ambassador,” Dr Kermond told Rheumatology Republic.
“Last year I went to Singapore, and this year was Fukuoka. It was great. I really feel like APLAR is a growing force, but particularly the the [Australian] young Rheumatologist branch, because of the willingness and eagerness to embrace different strategies to increase engagement.
“We always have a meeting when we go our business meeting where we talk about thoughts and ideas and plans. Last year in Singapore, we spoke about needing a social media presence and needing to have ways that people can just passively absorb events and information.”
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Social media accounts have been set up and now the focus is in increasing the engagement and make it accessible and get people engaged, she said.
Dr Kermond said she had the opportunity to attend a number of sessions at the APLAR Congress.
“I liked the women’s health reproductive medicine session because it’s already an area of interest for me,” she said.
“I really liked the updates on Sjögren’s disease; whilst none of it you can use now, there finally seems to be more things for these dry, dry mouths that we’re having to treat.
“The lupus delivery by Eric Morand is always good. I have seen him a couple of times, he’s a great presenter and motivating in terms of treating to target, which sounds like stating the obvious, but it’s good to have evidence to back up what we’re doing, and maybe to support more aggressive therapy initiation, which I think as a first year consultant, is something that I am still dancing the line of not wanting to be too cautious, but you also don’t want to go from zero to bulimia map in two seconds.
“I really liked all the different the plenary sessions on rheumatoid arthritis updates, and the gout talk was fantastic.
“I love treating gout because so much of treating it effectively is communicating in a way that translates to that patient’s health literacy. You’ll hear the wildest stuff when people talk about gout treatment, the diet changes that they’ll make different.
“People will say, I only eat tomatoes. Or someone will say, I never eat tomatoes. Some people will say. I’ve heard a patient once say they eat a kilo of cherries once a week to try and keep their gout away.
“All of this, instead of just having someone explain that you can get their uric acid down, you can induce, I call it remission rather than cure, because nothing in rheumatology is ever truly a cure, apart from maybe CAR-T cell therapy.
“If you take enough time and the patient’s receptive, they can finally stop flaring so horribly and get back to whatever they were doing.”
Dr Kermond spoke to RR from Rockhampton, where she holds monthly two-day clinics to help address a critical need for rheumatology care in the under-resourced area.
She said some patients have been waiting years for specialist consultations. The outreach is run by Dr Kermond and colleagues from their newly opened Brisbane clinic River City Rheumatology.
“Today I saw someone who was waiting four years on the public wait list, and other times it’s patients who are wanting a bit more consistency of care,” she said.
“In the public sector, you get who you get, whoever’s on at the time. And then sometimes it’s people who are just desperate to get an answer about whether they have a disease or they don’t. It’s a real mixed bag.”
Dr Kermond’s work represents a promising trend of young rheumatologists committed to addressing healthcare disparities and leveraging technology to improve patient outcomes.
