Clinical Tools to Assess and Monitor Spondyloarthritis

Assessment and monitoring is important in diseases affecting multiple sites and organs, such as axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) that may have several signs and symptoms, and for which several treatments are available. Instruments for assessment and monitoring should be appropriately validated, and it should be feasible to use them in clinical practice as well as in clinical trials. The Assessment in SpondyloArthritis International Society (ASAS) has developed core-sets of domains of disease and instruments to measure these domains, and recommends only the most important domains being measured with the best available methods. This article describes the ASAS core sets, as well as a few recent developments in the field of assessment, to be applied in clinical practice and research studies.