TUESDAY, April 4 (HealthDay News) -- Long-term use of etanercept to treat elderly patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is safe, the drug is well-tolerated, and the risk of adverse events is no greater than in younger patients, according to a study in the March issue of the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.
Roy Fleischmann, M.D., of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and colleagues analyzed safety data from an integrated database of 18 RA trials, two psoriatic arthritis trials and two ankylosing spondylitis trials comprising 4,322 subjects.
Comparing data on subjects who were 65 or older with the data of younger subjects, the researchers found no significant increase in the incidence of adverse events, serious adverse events, infectious events, medically important infections or malignancies.
"Etanercept is a generally safe and well-tolerated biological agent for treatment of rheumatological diseases in the elderly," the authors conclude.
However, they caution that much remains to be done in this field. "Rheumatic diseases are associated with significant comorbidities, including infections, cardiovascular disease and lymphomas. The role of drug treatment as a contributing factor, separate from the effects of the disease itself, is a complicated construct that is not fully understood at the present time and deserves further study and analysis," they write.
The study was supported by Immunex Corporation, a subsidiary of Amgen Inc., and by Wyeth.
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