The American College of Rheumatology praised the recent announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that their initial drug pricing negotiations have reduced costs for select medications, including significantly lower prices for Enbrel and Stelara, which are frequently used to treat rheumatic diseases.

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news and journal reports from the past week on RheumNow.com, noting his concerns about diet, cancer, ILD, death and dosing challenges.

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) patients not responding to usual dosing with secukinumab (150 mg) after 16 weeks were dose escalated to secukinumab (SEC) 300 mg, but failed to show improvement by week 52.

A recent article in PLOS ONE has shown that treatment of type 2 diabetes with glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1-RAs) was associated with a significant lowering of risk of all-cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events in patients with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and type 2 diabetes.

A Canadian cohort of difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis (D2T RA) patients shows significantly more non-inflammatory pain in D2T RA compared to patients responding to b/tsDMARDs.

A matched cohort study from the Veterans Health Administration shows that rheumatoid arthritis patients have a >50% increased risk of lung cancer, and a 3-fold higher risk of lung cancer in RA-interstitial lung disease (ILD).

Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news and journal reports from RheumNow.com this week.

A new scientific review of 148 studies enrolling over 4.3 million adult chronic pain patients treated with prescription opioid painkillers has found that nearly one in ten patients experiences opioid dependence or opioid use disorder and nearly one in three shows symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder.

Real-world, retrospective study of microscopic-polyangiitis (ΜPA) and granulomatosis-with-polyangiitis (GPA) patients shows that rituximab (RTX) maintenance was associated with 25% risk of relapse and that lower relapse rates was seen with RTX plus cyclophosphamide treatment.

Data from a major federal survey indicate that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) don't pay massively more for healthcare than other folks, nor is their risk for functional deficits tremendously greater, researchers found.

A systematic and scoping literature examined the Treat-to-target (T2T) approach to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), noting its implementation is suboptimal and finding many barriers to implementation.