How well are biologic and conventional DMARDs tolerated in psoriatic arthritis: A real world study

Even though disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) are well established in rou- tine clinical practice, longitudinal real-world data for their retention and tolerability are sparse, espe- cially in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) patients. Our objective was to describe the characteristics of our large PsA cohort including the comorbidities and evaluate real-world DMARD tolerability and discontinua- tion rates with reasons for stopping treatment.

We retrospectively interrogated the electronic, multipurpose, live setting database at our uni- versity hospital to identify 335 patients diagnosed with PsA who had received conventional DMARDs (cDMARDs) and/or biologic DMARDs (bDMARDs) between 1994 up to and including April 2019.

In total, 170 (50.7%) patients had discontinued one or more cDMARDs prior with a mean dura- tion before discontinuation of 9.9 months. In contrast, only 28 (24.8%) patients had stopped a course of bDMARDs at some point. The mean duration before biologic therapy was discontinued was 18.2 months.

To our knowledge, this is the first dedicated retrospective review of a large real-world PsA cohort addressing drug survival and tolerability of DMARDs over a 20-year period. Our study shows that in reality, cDMARDs are not well tolerated. This should encourage review of international guid- ance allowing earlier employment of biologics in the treatment paradigm.