Patients with rheumatoid arthritis who received initial combination therapy with adalimumab (Humira) plus methotrexate for two years had better long-term disease control than those who started on monotherapy, an open-label study showed.
At five years, 35% of patients whose initial treatment included both drugs met the stringent criteria of clinical remission, normal function, and no radiographic progression, compared with 13% of those who received only adalimumab and 14% of those taking methotrexate alone, according to Désirée van der Heijde, MD, PhD, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues.
These findings "indicate a window of opportunity to influence the disease course with early, aggressive treatment and suggest that there are consequences associated with delay of combination treatment in patients whose disease activity warrants such therapy," the investigators wrote in a paper published online by the Journal of Rheumatology.
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