BACKGROUND Tumour necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors enable tight control of disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Discontinuation of TNF inhibitors after acquisition of low disease activity (LDA) is important for safety and economic reasons. OBJECTIVE To determine whether infliximab might be discontinued after achievement of LDA in patients with RA and to evaluate progre...

Tight control of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may be guided by RAPID3 (routine assessment of patient index data), an index without formal joint counts or laboratory tests, which can be scored on a multidimensional health assessment questionnaire (MDHAQ) in 5 seconds, compared to 42 seconds to score a standard HAQ, 90 seconds to perform a 28-joint count, 114 seconds to score a disease activity scor...

Objectives: Methotrexate (MTX) is the first line treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but nevertheless 30% of patients experience MTX inefficacy. Our aim was to develop a clinical pharmacogenetic model to predict which RA patients will not respond to MTX monotherapy. We also assessed whether this model can be generalized to other populations by validating it on a group of Serbian RA patient...

Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Methodologies, Models and Algorithms for Patients Rehabilitation”. Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a progressive inflammatory disease that causes damage to multiple joints, decline in functional status, and premature mortality. Thus, effective and frequent objective assessments are necessary...

OBJECTIVES Cigarette smoking is a major risk factor for RA and has been associated with increased disease severity and lower rates of disease remission. We hypothesized that inflammation and disease activity would be associated with smoking status and this would be related to levels of ACPA. METHODS RA patients from the Veterans Affairs RA registry were studied (n = 1466): 76.9% anti-CCP2 pos...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the differences between the responses to treatment using DAS28 based on erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and C-reactive protein (CRP) in male and female patients. We then analyzed the individual behaviour of each component in a cohort of early arthritis patients in zone 2 of Madrid. PATIENTS AND METHODS We studied a total of 134 patients (77.6% women) who met the Ame...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The aim of this study was to compare the sleep quality between rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients and healthy controls; and to evaluate the relationship between RA disease activity and sleep quality in Korea. METHODS A total of 130 RA patients and 67 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were enrolled in a comparative study of sleep quality using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality I...

Objective. Previous work identified synovial sublining macrophage numbers as a potential biomarker for clinical efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Therefore, we investigated the association between changes in synovial macrophages infiltration and clinical improvement after antirheumatic treatment. Methods. 88 patients who participated in various clinical trials were studied. All patients un...

We present our real-life clinical experience of ZRC3197 (Adalimumab Biosimilar) in Indian patients with inflammatory arthritis [spondyloarthropathy (SPA) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA)]. Medical records of these patients were retrospectively retrieved and analysed at our single centre. All the patients had received biosimilar Adalimumab 40 mg every 15 days for initial 3 months. Post 3 months, an...

Patients' own ability to assess activity of their rheumatoid arthritis SIR, Increasingly patients are able to access their Rheumatology Department via nurse-led Rheumatology helplines and, due to the over-booking of our clinics and the long distances patients have to travel to attend, there clearly is a potential for departments to develop a telephone follow-up service for patients with rheuma-...