Modern Approaches to Psoriatic Arthritis Management

Announcer:

Welcome to Living Rheum on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Lawrence H. Brent, who will be discussing the evolving treatment landscape for psoriatic arthritis. Dr. Brent is a Professor of Medicine at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Here he is now.

Dr. Brent:

The treatment options compared to when I trained is really dramatically different. So we still use medications like methotrexate, which we also use in rheumatoid arthritis, but not nearly as much as we used to. And then there's medications that block TNF, so they're TNF blockers. You see them advertised on TV. There are medicines that block a chemical called IL-17. These are all chemicals that are naturally occurring in your body, but if you have psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis, you're producing too much of it. And so now we have agents to tone that level down. And then we even have agents that block IL-23. We have JAK inhibitors.

And for each of these medications, there's more than one available. So sometimes the insurance committee will tell you, no, we don't like this one. We like this one. And a lot of times, it doesn't really make that much difference. And then there's even a drug called apremilast, which has a different mechanism of action.

But some of these medications have certain side effects. Some of them are so safe, you really don't need to even check laboratory tests on a regular basis. But you would pick and choose. Which medication do I use in a patient based on if they have a little skin involvement, a lot of skin involvement? Do they have inflammatory disease in their back? Do they have inflammatory disease in their eyes or do they have inflammatory bowel disease? So some of these drugs are better in certain situations than others. And that's where a doctor—that's what their role is, to determine, in this particular patient, which treatment might work best for them to control all of their symptoms.

Announcer:

That was Dr. Lawrence H. Brent talking about therapeutic options for psoriatic arthritis. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Living Rheum on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!