BACKGROUND Glucocorticoid therapy is strongly associated with an elevated risk of serious infections in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The association between glucocorticoids and common non-serious infections (NSI) is not well studied. METHODS A cohort of 16 207 patients with RA aged over 65 years was assembled using administrative data from Quebec. Glucocorticoid and disease-modify...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to characterize patients with predominantly axial SpA who received SSZ as their first DMARD, compare the response to treatment in patients with and without peripheral disease and identify predictors of discontinuation of SSZ. We also investigated response to TNF inhibitor (TNFi) after SSZ failure. METHODS We included DMARD-naive patients with predo...

BACKGROUND The causes of the underutilization of disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDS) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are not fully known, but may in part, relate to individual patient factors including risk perception. Our objective was to identify the determinants of risk perception (RP) in RA patients and predictors of their willingness to take a proposed DMARD (DMARD willingness). ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether patients with rheumatoid arthritis who did not respond sufficiently to tocilizumab (TCZ) plus disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) treatment by Week 8 responded at later timepoints when continuing to take their original dose of TCZ. METHODS In this posthoc analysis of data from phase III randomized controlled trials of inadequate responders (IR) to DMARD ...

INTRODUCTION Standard measurements used to assess murine models of rheumatoid arthritis, notably paw thickness and clinical score, do not align well with certain aspects of disease severity as assessed by histopathology. We tested the hypothesis that non-invasive optical tomographic imaging of molecular biomarkers of inflammation and bone turnover would provide a superior quantitative readout a...

OBJECTIVE To compare rheumatologists' prescription for first disease modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in real-life settings with 2 clinical practice guidelines (CPG), the French Society of Rheumatology/STPR 2004 and EULAR/ESCISIT 2007, and thus assess the gap between practices and guidelines. Method. ESPOIR was a French multicenter cohort study of 813 pati...

BACKGROUND According to the 2010 criteria, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) can be classified in the presence of ≥6 points on the criteria or 'typical' erosive disease. RA-specific erosiveness however has not been defined yet. This study reports the results of the data driven phase of a European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) taskforce aiming to define RA-specific erosiveness. METHODS Baseline ra...