Maria Teresa García-Romero, MD: Introduction to the Morphea Activity Measure

During her recent HCPLive interview, Maria Teresa García-Romero, MD, MPH, spoke on her team’s recent development of the Morphea Activity Measure (MAM), a clinical tool designed for determining pediatric localized scleroderma (morphea).

García-Romero is known for her work at the Department of Dermatology at the National Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City.

In their recent study, her team found the MAM to be a reliable, viable, and validated tool for pediatric morphea activity measurement, although it will need further validation for adult patients.

The severity-assessment tool ended up, by the end of the 2-part study, using 10 items overall to be indicative of the inflammatory skin disorder.

García-Romero first discussed her early experiences with diagnosing morphea in patients as well as her work with Elena Pope MD, MSc, FRCPC, chairperson of the Pediatric Dermatology Research Alliance (PeDRA) in Toronto.

“When I went to Toronto, the person who was the chief of the department there, Elena Pope, had a morphea clinic,” García-Romero explained. “She had organized a morphea clinic. And I really learned a lot from Elena about how to tell if a patient had an active disease for which, as you may have read from our paper, there are not a lot of options.”

She further described her experiences in the clinic, explaining what led up to her team’s development of the MAM tool study and the variety of measures used to assess severity.

“But the reality is, we tend to do (assessments) very subjectively,” García-Romero said. “And so we started this longitudinal study, prospective. And I ended up staying 1 more year after I finished my clinical fellowship to finish this project, because I was very invested in it.”

García-Romero further described her work with PeDRA and what led up to the MAM study.

“We started working on this particular project, because, as I said, there's been these validated scales that are widely used,” she said. “But we think that they don't capture the wide variety of clinical manifestations that may mean morphea is active in patients.”

To learn more about García-Romero’s work, view the interview segment.