EULARguidelinesUpdatesCampaign_ProfCaporali_edit

♫ ♫ Well, I think that in the EULAR Recommendation 2016, JAK inhibitors were inserted as an effective drug that is practically the same level as anti-TNF. I think this is really very important for us and for the patient and I think this is due to the fact that these drugs underwent a large program of randomized control trials. In particular if you think about Baricitinib that was really studied in all the population of rheumatoid arthritis, maybe MTXR, maybe TNF-IR, maybe in combination, maybe in monotherapy, so all these trials allow the committee of the EULAR to insert this kind of drug at the same level of anti-TNF. ♫ Well, I think that in my experience this decision was absolutely right and that having this new drug for our patients was really important both for those patients that were, I mean... not responding to classical biological drugs, but also for naïve patients because for our patients, for the first time having a drug that was an oral drug so not the subcut drug was really very important. And also another very important situation in our clinical practice was the speed of this drug because you can see that in a couple of days patients experience improvement in pain and in the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. ♫ Well, I think that the new EULAR Recommendations are very similar to the old one. There have been some important, even if small, changes. Probably, one of the most striking change was the fact that when you think about JAK inhibitors in these guidelines, the older recommendation told us that the actual clinical practice was to use in the first line anti-TNF, a biological drug while now this kind of statement has been cancelled. So nowadays, the JAK inhibitors are at the same level at all for all the patients with rheumatoid arthritis, also for naïve patients. ♫ I think that it is correct because starting from the last Recommendation 2016 up to now, there have been many papers published on different JAK inhibitors and all these papers went in the same direction. So we now are more confident about the efficacy and the safety of these new compounds and also for example for Baricitinib, we can see a number of papers addressing the long-term efficacy and safety of this drug coming from the observational long-term extension trial in which you can clearly see that the efficacy may be observed in the long run and also the safety is consistent with the first I mean, information that we have been informed by the trials. ♫