FRIDAY, Feb. 24 (HealthDay News) -- A second course of treatment with methotrexate helps almost half of rheumatoid arthritis patients who do not initially respond to the drug or who stop taking it due to adverse events, according to a study published in the February issue of Arthritis Research & Therapy.
Theresa Kapral, M.D., of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues followed 1,490 rheumatoid arthritis patients, including 86 patients in whom methotrexate was re-employed after previous failure.
The researchers found that re-employment of methotrexate was associated with a reduced risk of ending treatment for being ineffective (hazard ratio, 0.64), especially if the maximum methotrexate dose was low (less than 12.5 mg/week) during the first treatment. Of 79 patients who took a second course of methotrexate for at least a year after terminating their first course (due to adverse events or inefficacy), 53.2 percent had a successful treatment.
"Re-employment of methotrexate despite prior inefficacy, but not re-employment of other disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, is an effective therapeutic option, especially in those patients in whom the methotrexate dose of the original course was low," the authors write.
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