Treatment of active rheumatoid arthritis : comparison between young and elderly patients (corpus cohort)

Overview & Synopsis

Objectives : anti-TNFα have proven its effects on optimisation of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treatment but there is only few and limited information about the characteristics of elderly patients with an active RA starting a second line’s treatment. The objective of this work was to compare the prescription patterns between RA patients older and younger than 75 years. Method : patients with active RA (DAS28 > 3.2 despite a first line therapy) naive to biologics,were included between 2007 and 2009 in a multicenter, longitudinal, prospective, observational population-based cohort: the CORPUS-RA cohort. Patients who received other biologics than anti-TNFα during the follow-up period and patients without follow-up were excluded. Patients were considered as anti-TNFα receivers if they had at least one injection between the inclusion visit and the follow-up visit. Results : among the 543 RA patients, 382 had complete one-year follow-up data. Among these patients, 114 received at least one TNFα antagonist dose during the one-year follow-up. Three of 49 elderly patients (6%) versus 111 of 333 young patients (32%) (p