Tofacitinib shows good retention rates in PsA patients

Tofacitinib demonstrates safety and persistence in patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) who are mostly refractory to biologic and oral targeted synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, results of a study have shown.

Of the 72 patients (mean age 51.9 years, mean disease duration 10.4 years) included, 54 were women. Nearly a third (>70 percent) of these participants used tofacitinib as ≥third-line therapy.

The median tofacitinib survival was 13.0 months, with a 1-year retention rate of 52.7 percent (95 percent confidence interval [CI], 42.4‒65.6). Sex, disease duration, comorbidities, or line of treatment did not have an impact on drug survival.

Of note, drug discontinuation was more likely to occur among younger patients (hazard ratio [HR], 0.96; p=0.01) and those with enthesitis (HR, 0.37; p=0.03).

Adverse events had an overall rate of 52.9 percent per 100 person-years (95 percent CI, 38.5‒70.6), most of which occurred during the first 6 months of exposure.

”Patients with refractory PsA and enthesitis might be a specific target population for this drug,” the investigators said.

This single-centre retrospective longitudinal observational study was conducted on PsA patients who received at least one dose of tofacitinib. The investigators assessed drug survival using Kaplan-Meier curves and analysed persistence explanatory factors via multivariate Cox regression models. HR was used to measure associations.