2017 was a big year for psoriatic arthritis

March 9, 2018|Psoriatic Arthritis ICYMI

EXPERT ANALYSIS FROM RWCS 2018

MAUI, HAWAII – 2017 was a banner year in the field of psoriatic arthritis, marked by a huge bump in the number of publications on the topic along with the approval of three additional drugs, Arthur Kavanaugh, MD, said at the 2018 Rheumatology Winter Clinical Symposium.

“There is a tremendous amount of excitement now in the field of psoriatic arthritis,” observed Dr. Kavanaugh, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Innovative Therapy at the University of California, San Diego.

Indeed, a PubMed search turned up roughly 700 publications on psoriatic arthritis in 2017, roughly twice the number published each year during 2009-2011. This boom in research bodes well for better times ahead for psoriatic arthritis patients, who at present lag roughly a decade behind patients with rheumatoid arthritis in terms of treatment success.

Together with his colleague Eric M. Ruderman, MD, Dr. Kavanaugh highlighted the three new drug approvals for psoriatic arthritis in 2017 – abatacept(Orencia), tofacitinib(Xeljanz), and ixekizumab(Taltz) – and also discussed important recent studies of several drugs already available.