Tools for monitoring remission in rheumatoid arthritis: any will do, let's just pick one and start measuring
Author affiliations
1 NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases, 333 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016, USA
2 Division of Rheumatology, Gulhane School of Medicine, GATA Romatoloji BD, 06018, Etlik, Ankara, Turkey
Citation and License
Arthritis Research & Therapy 2013, 15:104 doi:10.1186/ar4139
See related research by Zhang et al., http://arthritis-research.com/content/14/3/R156
Published: 28 January 2013Abstract
Rheumatoid arthritis treatment has seen major changes in the last decade, one of which is the concept of treating to target. Various composite outcome measures have been developed, and the latest is the new American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism remission criteria. Zhang and colleagues test the predictive validity of the new criteria in an observational cohort and show that they work as well as other definitions of remission. Our main challenge remains getting rheumatologists to use one of the outcome measures rather than developing new measures that are basically no different from already available measures in predicting functional and radiographic changes, the two most important long-term outcomes of rheumatoid arthritis.
