Rheumatoid Arthritis

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,

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.

Over the last 50 years, discoveries of connections between inflammation and the nervous system have been better understood.

JAK inhibitors have taken a beating over the last three years. The excitement and potential has been tempered by mounting cardiovascular safety concerns, but specifically in at-risk patients, compared to TNF inhibitors. So it is an intriguing idea to pair JAK inhibitors with something that might have a cardioprotective effect. It is therefore worth excitement that we have a therapeutic option to follow which does just that. At EULAR 2025, we