The feedback from our ROAR 2016 event in September tells us that everyone who attended either in-person or online using the webinar has no doubt about the value of researchers and patients working together to improve research and to make the results more widely available.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the Ismaili community for their gracious hospitality, their lovely volunteers and for providing their beautiful facility.  It was wonderful to have many of our first time attendees join us from the Ismaili community, so many in fact that extra chairs were required.  As well, the in-person audience was able to peruse current research posters and speak with Arthritis Research Canada’s researchers and trainees to learn more about the great research being conducted.  A huge thank you to the twenty-four attendees who signed up to take part in current research projects.

We are happy to report that Twitter statistics for #eROAR were doubled for the year to date 2016 over the full calendar year of 2015. We’ve come a long way if you compare the Twitter impressions from 2013 (226,774) to 2016 (3,533,964)! We owe a big thank you to Bernadette Keefe, MD for assisting with our Twitter mediation. Our webinar attendance is expanding every year with participants locally, provincially (50%), nationally and internationally from as far away as the United Kingdom and Africa.

A special thank you to Karen Tsui, Physiotherapist who provided the opportunity to put activity into practice by leading a “get up and stretch” break at the event while explaining the benefits of each stretch along with modifications.  This popular component of ROAR is something that we always get very positive feedback on.

The presentations:

The speaker slides and videos of the individual presentations listed below can now be viewed at https://www.arthritisresearch.ca/roar2016.

• Diane Lacaille on “Making It Work”, helping people with Inflammatory Arthritis maintain employment. Participants learned strategies and skills for dealing with challenges at work and gaining confidence.
• Hyon Choi joined us for the event from Harvard University, along with Arthritis Research Canada trainee Sharan Rai on “What you can do to better control your gout”. Gout is the most common form of inflammatory arthritis and can be “cured,” however, adherence to treatments/diet are notoriously low.
• Linda Li presented on a very topical subject on “Wearables” (i.e. Fitbit). We know exercise is medicine, however, the big message is “Sit Less!”
• Catherine Backman’s presentations are always uplifting. At this year’s ROAR she reiterated that you already knew everything you need to about balancing life while managing arthritis, you learned it in Kindergarten – work, play, naps and looking out for each other leads to health enhancing happiness.
• Claire Barber reminded us of the signs of strokes and the risks for cardiovascular disease for people with Inflammatory Arthritis.
• Jenny Leese and Graham MacDonald discussed the joys and challenges of Wearables/Activity Trackers with interesting and surprising results.

We look forward to inviting you to ROAR 2017.  In the meantime, after you watch the ROAR 2016 videos you can find all of the archived ROAR videos (2011 – 2016) available for viewing at https://www.arthritisresearch.ca/videos/roar.