At a EULAR 2025 session titled “What makes ‘Difficult-to-treat RA’ so difficult to treat? And what can we do?”, Drs. Paula David and Dennis McGonagle introduced the emerging concept of polyrefractory rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a term now being used to describe a subset of patients who have failed to respond to five or more biologic or targeted synthetic DMARDs. This new classification, derived from recent multinational registry data,

Most patients with early, active axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) who quickly received a tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitor experienced remission, and it didn't matter whether or not they had intestinal inflammation at baseline, a small single-arm study found.

Knee braces, water therapy and exercise are the most promising non-drug therapies for treating knee osteoarthritis, according to a new meta-analysis publishing June 18, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Yuan Luo of the First People’s Hospital of Neijiang, China.

It's easy to think that in our current world that we've done it all for rheumatoid arthritis, that there's nothing left to be done after b/tsDMARDs have become relatively widespread and accessible. If we aren’t satisfied that we’ve done all we can for our RA patients, how can we make their treatment and their lives better?

Dr. Jack Cush reviews highlights, trends and novel studies from EULAR 2025 in Barcelona from last week.

Advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, particularly the treat-to-target strategy and the introduction of effective DMARDs, have improved the management of inflammation in RA. However, improved inflammatory markers do not always translate into a resolution of patients’ symptoms or improvements in functional capacity. A recent pooled analysis from the CareRA and CareRA2020 randomized controlled trials shed new light on this