Medizinische Universität Graz Austria/Österreich - Forschungsportal - Medical University of Graz
Gewählte Publikation:
Wild, M.
CHANGE IN DISEASE ACTIVITY OF RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS PATIENTS OVER TEN YEARS OF THERAPY - A real-life retrospective observation
Humanmedizin; [ Diplomarbeit ] Graz Medical University; 2016. pp. 80
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- Autor*innen der Med Uni Graz:
- Betreuer*innen:
- Graninger Winfried
- Hermann Josef
- Altmetrics:
- Abstract:
- Background. In most cases treatment of the systemic and chronic inflammatory disease rheumatoid arthritis (RA) according to established tight control guidelines leads to a good outcome. It was of interest for us if we could prove that the changes and adaption of the physicians’ therapeutic behaviour in recent years had a positive impact on the therapy outcome in our cohort. Additionally, we wanted to evaluate the effect of newly introduced biologic agents on disease activity of RA-patients in comparison to synthetic pharmaceuticals (sDMARDs), such as methotrexate. Methods. We extracted data of 103 rheumatoid arthritis patients who were under regular and stringent control over ten years from the clinical management software RCQM and divided this patient collective into groups according to their initial disease activity score (DAS) or medication. A retrospective analysis of the data was performed in order to examine the course of disease activity of these patients over the observed time. A linear mixed effects model was chosen for the statistical regression analysis. Results. Patients with an initially high or moderate disease activity showed a significant decrease of disease activity by 2.4 and 1.3 DAS points, respectively. The low disease activity group presented with a continuously low DAS around the 3.2 mark. When looking at the specific medication of the patients, we could find that a combination therapy of biologic and synthetic agents (sDMARDs) indeed resulted in a better outcome than an sDMARDs-monotherapy and lowered the DAS stronger by 0.3 points. Conclusion. The statistically significant findings for disease activity over time allow us to support the tight control and Treat-to-Target concepts for RA-therapy. Furthermore, treatment with biologic agents or a combination with them can be seen as more effective. However, these results were not statistically significant, but a trend was visible from the graphical solution.