Enbrel therapy allowed more rheumatoid arthritis patients to achieve clinical remission
April 17, 2017
Patients treated with ENBREL combination therapy also experienced significant improvement in functionality after two years. Improvement in functionality was significantly higher for the combination group as assessed by patients??™ responses to the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ). Patients treated with ENBREL combination therapy experienced a 56 percent mean improvement in HAQ scores from baseline, compared to 39 percent mean improvement in patients treated with ENBREL alone and 36 percent mean improvement in patients treated with methotrexate alone.
Also presented at the meeting were data from the first year of the TEMPO study, showing that 80 percent of the combination-treated patients experienced no progression of joint damage on radiographs at one year as assessed by the van der Heijde-modified Total Sharp Score (TSS), compared with 68 percent of the patients treated with ENBREL monotherapy and 57 percent of patients treated with methotrexate monotherapy. The TSS is an X-ray measurement of changes in joint damage. ???No progression??? is defined as a unit change from baseline ofTSS < 0.5.
The ENBREL TEMPO study randomized 682 patients with RA to one of three treatment groups: ENBREL (25 mg twice weekly), methotrexate (up to 20 mg once weekly), or ENBREL (25 mg twice weekly) plus methotrexate. Patients in the ENBREL TEMPO trial had active RA and had failed at least one disease-modifying antirheumatic drug other than methotrexate.
Treatment with ENBREL or combination therapy was generally well tolerated. The safety profile was generally consistent with that previously observed, and the combination did not result in increased infections after two years of therapy.
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