Is There a Symmetry in Disease Control and Quality of Life of Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated with Biological Therapy?

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and compare the disease activity control and quality of life of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who were treated with biological products in real-life settings. We tried to determine whether there is a symmetry in the performance of the biological molecules between each other and with the first Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor. This is an observational, longitudinal, real-life study performed in the biggest rheumatology clinic during the period 2012–2020 comparing quality of life, cost of therapy, and disease control via different clinical measures. In all three disease activities measurement instruments, we observed an improvement for all biologic and target synthetic medicines. The disease activity score (DAS28) score decreased from 5.06 to 3.01, on average, for all INNs, suggesting that the majority of patients move away from moderate to low disease activity. The clinical disease activity index (CDAI) score decreased from 25.9 to 9.4, also indicating that patients with moderate disease activity reached a low level of activity. Similar results are reflected in the score, which fell from 27.7 to 10.3, again confirming the improvement to a low level of disease activity for patients treated with all INNs. Logically, with the successful control of disease activity, the quality of life (QoL) of the observed patients improved from 0.77 to 0.83 after a one-year follow up, as measured with the EuroQuol 5D-3L (EQ5D). Based on these results, we can consider that the observed biological INNs perform symmetrically in terms of the control of disease activity and improvement in the QoL of the observed patients. Biological therapy improves the disease control and quality of life of suitable patients with RA in real-life settings. All available biological therapies could be used interchangeably.