Conference Coverage
Pain often persists despite biologic treatment in PsA
MADRID – Psoriatic arthritis patients may have more than just inflammatory pain symptoms.
MADRID – Fatigue is an important symptom in patients with psoriatic arthritis but often goes unaddressed when treatment only involves disease modifying drugs.
A survey of more than 1,000 patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) in Denmark found that more than half had moderate or severe levels of fatigue, and a principal component analysis of the sources of fatigue found three factors responsible for the majority of reported patient fatigue: chronic inflammation, chronic pain, and chronification of the PsA, Tanja S. Jørgensen, PhD, said at the European Congress of Rheumatology.
Mitchel L. Zoler/Frontline Medical News
“Pain is the most important symptom in patients with psoriatic arthritis, but fatigue is second-most important. It has a huge impact on patient quality of life,” she said.
“Just treating inflammation doesn’t do it all. We need to do more, think differently, think outside the box” of relying primarily on disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, especially biological drugs, to resolve symptoms in PsA patients. “We should not think that biologicals do it all.”
The upshot is that PsA patients may have their inflammatory markers under control with treatment but still report that they don’t feel well, have pain, are tired, and have no energy.
But Dr. Jørgensen admitted that she couldn’t say with any certainty what additional interventions might help resolve pain and fatigue in PsA patients.
“I tell them to walk and be active; I think that may help. But we don’t really know what to do,” she said in an interview.
Her study included 1,062 PsA patients enrolled during December 2013-December 2014 in the Danish DANBIO registry of patients with inflammatory arthritides who received treatment with a biological drug. These participants also agreed to both complete a painDETECT Questionnaire and to rate their fatigue on a visual analog scale.
Dr. Jørgensen and her associates designated a visual analog scale score of at least 57 out of 100 as representing moderate or severe fatigue and found that 542 (51%) of the patients had fatigue self-ratings that fell in this range. Patients with this higher fatigue level also had significantly worse PsA with significantly higher numbers of swollen and tender joints, higher painDETECT scores, and higher scores on their Health Assessment Questionnaire and their 28-joint Disease Activity Score using C-reactive protein.
When the researchers ran a principal component analysis on these data, they identified three primary factors contributing to fatigue. Chronic inflammation contributed 31% of the fatigue effect, chronification contributed 17%, and chronic pain contributed 15%, Dr. Jørgensen reported.
Dr. Jørgensen has received research support from AbbVie, Biogen, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, and UCB.
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