A woman with lupus had fingers and thumbs that looked visibly deformed. Then she clenched her hands into fists, and the deformities disappeared.
That quirk was the clue. Doctors diagnosed Jaccoud's arthropathy, a condition in which joints drift out of alignment because the tissues around them loosen, not because the joints themselves are destroyed. The case was published in August 2026 in The New England Journal of Medicine by Ranjan Gupta and Rudra Prosad Goswami.
