Announcer:
This is ReachMD. Welcome to this special series, Beyond Skin Deep: Impacts of Psoriatic Arthritis, sponsored by Lilly.
Dr. Birnholz:
From the ReachMD studios in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, I’m Dr. Matt Birnholz. On this episode, we caught up with Dr. Alexis Ogdie, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ogdie describes how various outcome measures utilized in practice can benefit patient care. Here’s what she shared with us from her office in Philadelphia.
Dr. Ogdie:
Well, I think there’s a variety of new outcomes that are being used in patients with psoriatic arthritis, and these include things like the PsAID, which is a new patient-reported outcome measure. It was developed by EULAR. It’s a 12-item questionnaire. And what’s nice about this one is that it includes things beyond just pain and function. It also asks about work, social activities, depression, anxiety, and embarrassment, coping, so all those other parts that we don’t necessarily ask about on a regular basis. So, I think that’s a great opportunity for addressing all of those other associated comorbidities that kind of play a role in the patient’s course with their disease and the impact of the disease on their life. In addition, I think just the increased knowledge of the heterogeneity of the disease and the need to measure dactylitis and enthesitis as important outcomes within the disease, and the use of the larger joint count to account for the feet where many patients with psoriatic arthritis have active disease. So, these things are probably pushing us to measure the disease more rigorously within clinical practice and then to follow those things over time so that we’re treating the patient to a target or at least to kind of a lower disease activity.
Speaking of target, some of the new targets—or maybe not as new anymore—but there’s minimal disease activity. The TICOPA trial showed that patients who were followed according to minimal disease activity or trying to get people to minimal disease activity, those patients did much better in terms of reaching ACR20, the joint outcome. So, that trial suggested that it is important to follow each of these different disease endpoints so that we’re getting patients to as low disease activity as possible. On the other hand, one of the side effects of that is that there are more side effects, and so it’s important to counsel patients about the risk of side effects with medications as you’re trying to treat them more aggressively. So, some patients you’re going to shoot for a little bit of a higher target, maybe low disease activity is good; for others you might shoot for closer to remission.
Dr. Birnholz:
You just heard from Dr. Alexis Ogdie on the new outcome measures in psoriatic arthritis and the advantages of putting them to practice. I’m Dr. Matt Birnholz with ReachMD, inviting our listeners to be part of the knowledge.
Announcer:
The preceding program was sponsored by Lilly. Content for this series is produced and controlled by ReachMD. This series is intended for healthcare professionals only. To revisit any part of this discussion and to access other episodes in this series, visit ReachMD.com/beyondskindeep. Thank you for listening to ReachMD. Be Part of the Knowledge.
