Yasser El Miedany
King’s College, London
Title: Towards Rheumatoid Arthritis Cure: Optimizing Therapy and Prediction of Relapse after Tapering Medications
Biography
Biography: Yasser El Miedany
Abstract
The substantial improvement in the management of inflammatory arthritis and the control of the inflammatory process whether by using synthetic or biologic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs), have led to a significant change in the patients’ clinical outcomes and targets of management. After inducing remission was considered, by all the disease management guidelines, as the treatment goal; sustained remission became the desired target. Reaching this stage paved the way for another query regarding the optimal management approaches and whether the patients have reached a phase of disease control that warrants stopping the treatment, i.e. disease cure. This presentation will discuss the recent concepts of defining remission in patients with inflammatory arthritis and the outcomes of a recent study carried out studying the optimum strategies towards drug discontinuation and best biomarkers, whether radiologic, laboratory or clinical; which may help in predicting the risk of relapse in the subgroup of inflammatory arthritis patients who achieved that target and stopped their treatment. The presentation will also present how to set a tailored and dynamic treatment strategy for inflammatory arthritis patients who achieved full disease control; with views towards pre-medication discontinuation assessment as well as post-treatment stopping monitoring.