Rush Lupus Clinic physicians are engaged in both physician initiated and clinical trials in lupus aimed at improving our understanding of the disease, patient care and health outcomes in lupus.
Our work
Meenakshi Jolly, MD’s main clinical and research focus is lupus. She is interested in better understanding the disease, flares, and health outcomes in lupus. She is particularly interested in patient reported outcomes in lupus, and how psycho-social health intersects with their quality of life. She has focused on body image particularly; an area poorly researched in lupus, and designed a novel intervention geared at improving body image in lupus patients and thus their quality of life. Intimacy, pregnancy, dyadic relationship, caregiver issues in lupus have also been studied by her.
In an effort to improve health outcomes in lupus, Jolly has been instrumental in developing patient reported quality of life survey tools for lupus, based on patients feedback. These are called LupusPRO, Lupus Impact Tracker and Body Image in Lupus Screen. She has also developed the only patient based tool in lupus to estimate how active the disease is. This tool requires negligible health care team involvement. It is called SIMPLE.
Jolly is engaged in ongoing lupus clinical trials, collaborative lupus studies with bench researchers, quality improvement projects and educational intervention study for cardiovascular diseases.
Our team
Our Lupus Research Team includes the following:
- Meenakshi Jolly, MD
- Winston Sequeira, MD
- Ailda Nika, MD
- Rheumatology fellows, internal medicine residents
- Joshlean Fair, MS - Study Coordinator
- Lauren Klebek - Regulatory Coordinator
- Doha Mohammad - Research Assistant
- Vinay Seghal - Academic Volunteer
Contact us
Email: rheumatology@rush.edu