The discussion around difficult-to-manage arthritis will be among the highlights of this version of the Congress, as it is clearly one of the challenges for rheumatologists worldwide.
Why? As everyone knows, these are patients who have a disease that is one of the main causes of disability in people of productive age, but who do not in all cases respond adequately to standard treatment with methotrexate and are therefore defined as difficult to manage.
Thus, the conversation and presentation will revolve around two visions of treatment: the European and the American, which, although they seek the same objective, to cure, they foresee different paths to achieve it, whether it be scaling up to other treatments by combining classic drugs, using biological DMARS or employing targeted synthetics.
However, there are patients who also do not respond to these types of treatments and, today, there is an EULAR definition of resistant or difficult-to-manage RA, which are those patients who fail two or more biologic or synthetic DMARDs.
To this end, this roundtable is primarily aimed at seeing in those patients who do not respond to initial treatment whether it is better to combine disease-modifying drugs, such as triple therapy or methotrexate and leflunomide, or directly escalate to a biologic agent or a targeted synthetic, so we must look for other options for their treatments.
Attendees will see an interesting controversy and debate on the American and European positions, which will provide input to rheumatologists who see and deal with difficult-to-manage arthritis patients on a daily basis in order to find the best response to the disease, and will be able to benefit from these two views in the midst of an exciting discussion.
