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08-02-2019 | Psoriatic arthritis | News

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PRO results back tofacitinib use in PsA patients

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medwireNews: Two post-hoc analyses published in RMD Open indicate that treatment with the Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor tofacitinib is associated with an improvement in patient-reported outcomes (PROs) among individuals with psoriatic arthritis (PsA).

The first study involved 373 patients with an inadequate response to conventional DMARDs who were given tofacitinib 5 mg or 10 mg twice daily, placebo, or adalimumab in the OPAL Broaden trial. After 3 months of treatment there were significant improvements favoring tofacitinib over placebo in a number of PROs, including global assessment of disease activity, pain, Patient Global Joint and Skin Assessment, and physical functioning scores.

Vibeke Strand (Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA) and co-investigators say that these “clinically meaningful improvements” were maintained for up to 1 year, and “[p]atients receiving tofacitinib reported similar improvements to those receiving the active control adalimumab.”

In the second study, Strand and colleagues analyzed PROs in the OPAL Beyond trial, which involved 394 patients with a previous inadequate response to tumor necrosis factor inhibitors. In accordance with the OPAL Broaden results, improvements in various PROs were significantly greater among patients treated with tofacitinib 5 mg or 10 mg twice daily compared with placebo, and the improvements were maintained for up to 6 months.

“The results of these studies […] further support the use of JAK inhibition as a novel mechanism for the treatment of PsA,” conclude the investigators.

By Claire Barnard

medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare. © 2019 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group

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