| A dose adjustment in patients with rheumatoid arthritis not optimally responding to a standard dose of infliximab of 3 mg/kg every 8 weeks can be effective: a Belgian prospective study (2005) | |||||||||||||
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| Objectives. To analyse the effect of a dose increase in patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with insufficient clinical response to 3 mg/kg infliximab every 8 weeks. Methods. Patients suffering from active refractory RA despite methotrexate, were treated with i.v. infusions of infliximab (3 mg/kg) on week 0, 2, 6 and every 8 weeks thereafter. Based on the clinical judgement at week 22, patients received a dose increase of 100 mg from week 30 on. The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) core set for disease activity measures was regularly assessed. Results. Five hundred and eleven RA patients were included. At week 22, 61.4, 34 and 14.1% of all patients met ACR 20, ACR 50 and ACR 70 criteria, respectively, and 6.1% of patients were in remission. A low swollen joint count at baseline was correlated with improvement at week 22 for ACR 20 (P | |||||||||||||
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