Biologics used to treat ERA include adalimumab (Humira or biosimilar), etanercept (Enbrel or biosimilar) and infliximab (Remicade or biosimilar). Some patients with ERA have another associated condition like uveitis or inflammatory bowel disease. In these cases, this would affect which biologic you would select in discussion with your health care team. [...]
At this time, most of the research for peptide-based therapies has been in animal models of rheumatoid arthritis with some promising results. More studies are needed in humans to determine whether these are feasible and effective treatments. Typically novel therapies are developed and tested in adults before they are studied in pediatric patients. [...]
Yes, there are a new class of biologics that are oral, called JAK inhibitors. This includes a medication called tofacitinib (Xeljanz) that has been studied in children with polyarticular JIA. These medications will become more commonly used in a variety of diseases, and hopefully more available to children and teens.
At present, it is not known what factors- symptoms, lab tests, or disease type- put a patient at higher risk of flare off medication. Your doctor is the best to evaluate whether the symptoms you describe are due to active inflammation, or perhaps due to other issues.
We do not know if taking a biologic treatment for a longer period will influence the chance of a long lasting remission of disease. Each patient is very individual, and other factors, such as type of disease and previous flares, likely have influence over chance for disease remission off medications.
In university it can be easy to get overwhelmed with workload and focus solely on your school work rather than your body. There have been times where I took my medication late, or didn’t listen to my body in order to get work done. Although I thought this wasn’t a big deal, it caused [...]
Both biologics and biosimilars are created in living cells. Biosimilars are drugs that are highly similar to an originator biologic that has already been approved by for use by regulatory bodies. This means that there cannot be any meaningful differences between the biosimilar and the reference drug with respect to effectiveness and safety. In [...]
The information we have to date on use of biologic treatments in adolescents do not indicate that there should be any concern that these treatments affect puberty or development in any way. As your teen goes into his growth spurt, his doctors may change his doses to account for weight increase. [...]
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