Comment on “Efficacy and Treatment Costs of Monotherapy with bDMARDs in the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis in Patients Intolerant to or Inappropriate to Continue Treatment with Methotrexate”

We would like to provide a clarification to the reader about our article ‘‘Efficacy and Treatment Costs of Monotherapy with bDMARDs in the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis in Patients Intolerant to or Inappropriate to Continue Treatment with Methotrexate’’ published in issue 33, pp 1360–1373. In Italy tocilizumab adheres to the payback system, so its ex-factory price does not include the ex-ante discount of 5%, differently from adalimumab and etanercept. The detail of the ex-post economic compensation for tocilizumab is not publicly available so we could not take it into account. Therefore, for all the drugs considered in the analysis, for comparability purpose only the temporary discount of -5% imposed by national law is taken into consideration.