Ann Clarke

Ann Clarke’s diminutive size belies a personality big enough to be the driving force behind the Lupus Clinic at the Montreal General Hospital site of the MUHC. The immunologist-epidemiologist from Newfoundland helps run the clinic, which, with close to 500 patients, is the largest of its kind in Quebec, the second largest in Canada, and a powerhouse in lupus research worldwide.

Clarke says it was the complexity of the disease that attracted her interest in the late 1980s, when she was a resident in internal medicine and later a fellow in allergy-immunology at McGill University and the Montreal Genera l Hospital. A chronic autoimmune disorder that affects between 15,000 and 50,000 Canadians, lupus is often called the disease with a thousand faces because its symptoms vary greatly from one patient to the next and over the course of the illness.

“From a clinician’s standpoint, lupus is challenging because many body systems can be involved and because you can’t predict what the next symptom will be,” explains Clarke. “From a patient’s standpoint, the disease can be incredibly stressful because you never know if and when it will get worse and how your quality of life will be affected.After learning about the medical side of lupus while specializing in immunology at McGill, Clarke decided to attack the disease from another angle. In 1993, as a master’s student at Stanford University in health policy research, she wrote a thesis that looked at the social and economic costs of treatment.

Later that year Clarke returned to Montreal—a city she loves—to join the team at the Lupus Clinic at the Montreal General Hospital as assistant physician, where she devoted her energy to both the clinical and research sides of treating the disease. In the years since then, she has pushed to improve the clinic’s efficiency—efforts that were rewarded when she was appointed co-director in 1997.

Her research continues today, as she is interested in finding out what environmental and genetic factors may predispose people to developing lupus. Studies to determine these factors could include other specialists at the MUHC and will be greatly facilitated with the centralization of the MUHC’s resources. “We’re proud of our multidisciplinary approach and the expertise we’ve accumulated in treating lupus,” says Clarke. “Essentially, every solid answer we can give our patients offers them a measure of relief from the constant anxiety that’s part and parcel of living with the disease.”

Ann Clarke’s Research at a Glance

Research Focus
Work on outcomes research in autoimmune rheumatic conditions, concentrating primarily on women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and children with inflammatory arthritis continues. Extending methodologic and clinical expertise to children with atopy, specifically food allergy are also a focus.

Selected Publications
Kagan RS, Joseph L, Dufresne C, Gray-Donald K, Turnbull E, St-Pierre Y, Clarke AE. Prevalence of peanut allergy in primary school children in Montreal, Canada. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 2003;112:1223-1228.

Clarke AE, Petri MA, Manzi S, Isenberg DA, Gordon C, Senécal J-L, Goulet JR, Choquette D, Sutcliffe N, Grodzicky T, Fortin PR, Joseph L, Penrod J, Danoff DS, Ho V, Esdaile JM. An international perspective on the well-being and health care costs for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Journal of Rheumatology 1999;26:1500-1511.

The MUHC’s own site will give you an A-Z of researchers at the Research Institute.