In this video, I share the rheumatoid arthritis treatments I have tried and what has worked or what hasn’t. Everyone’s different, this is just my rheumatoid arthritis medication story so far. I’m super grateful for modern medicine, and alternative methods that helped me!
Dr. Ritu Chakravarti, assistant professor in The University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences, is the lead author of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing the creation of an experimental vaccine against rheumatoid arthritis. CREDIT Daniel Miller | The University of Toledo
Researchers at The University of Toledo have developed an experimental vaccine that shows significant promise in preventing rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune disease that cannot currently be cured.
The findings, detailed in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent a major breakthrough in the study of rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases in general.
One of the most common autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis occurs when the body’s immune system attacks and breaks down healthy tissue — most notably the lining of joints in the hands, wrists, ankles and knees.
Some estimates suggest rheumatoid arthritis affects as much as 1% of the global population.
“In spite of its high prevalence, there is no cure and we don’t entirely know what brings it on. This is true of nearly all autoimmune diseases, which makes treating or preventing them so difficult,” said Dr. Ritu Chakravarti, an assistant professor in the UToledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences and the paper’s lead author. “If we can successfully get this vaccine into the clinic, it would be revolutionary.”
Chakravarti has for years studied a protein called 14-3-3 zeta and its role in immune pathologies, including aortic aneurysms and interleukin-17— a cytokine associated with autoimmune diseases. Based on their prior work, the research group was focused on the protein as a potential trigger for rheumatoid arthritis.
Instead, they found the opposite.
Rather than preventing rheumatoid arthritis, researchers discovered that removing the protein through gene-editing technology caused severe early onset arthritis in animal models.
Working under a new theory that the 14-3-3 zeta protein protects against rheumatoid arthritis, the team developed a protein-based vaccine using purified 14-3-3 zeta protein grown in a bacterial cell.
They found the vaccine promoted a strong and immediate — but long-lasting — response from the body’s innate immune system, providing protection against the disease.
“Much to our happy surprise, the rheumatoid arthritis totally disappeared in animals that received a vaccine,” Chakravarti said. “Sometimes there is no better way than serendipity. We happened to hit a wrong result, but it turned out to be the best result. Those kinds of scientific discoveries are very important in this field.”
In addition to suppressing the development of arthritis, the vaccine also significantly improved bone quality — a finding that suggests there should be long-term benefits following immunization.
Currently, rheumatoid arthritis is treated primarily with corticosteroids, broad scale immunosuppressive drugs or newer, more targeted biologics that target a specific inflammatory process.
While those therapeutics can alleviate pain and slow the progression of the disease, they also can make patients more vulnerable to infection and, in the case of biologics, can be costly.
“We have not made any really big discoveries toward treating or preventing rheumatoid arthritis in many years,” Chakravarti said. “Our approach is completely different. This is a vaccine-based strategy based on a novel target that we hope can treat or prevent rheumatoid arthritis. The potential here is huge.”
Researchers have filed for a patent on their discovery and are seeking pharmaceutical industry partners to support safety and toxicity studies in hopes of establishing a preclinical trial.
Dr. David Brady explains some of the natural approaches to reversing Rheumatoid arthritis with Randy Alvarez on The Wellness Hour.
While medications that treat RA are a great tool for decreasing inflammation and allergic reactions, some patients may experience side effects. It is important to communicate with your doctor about any negative effects that you may experience. In this video, Vicky Ruffing, RN-BC, discusses the benefits, risks, and side effects of these medications.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems.
A significant proportion of people with RA still have symptoms despite receiving treatment according to the current management recommendations. These people can be considered to have ’difficult-to-treat RA’.
EULAR prefers the term ‘difficult-to-treat’ for this group of people because it best captures the possible clinical scenarios. However, the concept is also still sometimes called severe, refractory, or drug-resistant RA. Managing these people can be challenging, and until now there have been no specific clinical recommendations. A task force was set up to develop new evidence-based points to consider for the management of people with difficult-to-treat RA. T
he group included rheumatologists and other health professionals and patient partners. Two overarching principles and 11 points were developed, alongside an algorithm that provides a visual summary of the suggested roadmap for people with difficult-to-treat RA.
The overarching principles stress that these points are specifically for people who meet the definition of difficult-totreat RA, and are underpinned by the main EULAR
recommendations. T
hey also state that the presence or absence of inflammation should be established to guide both pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions. The specific management points focus on diagnostic confirmation of RA, evaluation of inflammatory disease activity, pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions, treatment adherence, functional disability, pain, fatigue, goal setting and self-efficacy, and the impact of comorbidities.
EULAR hopes that these points will provide a clinical roadmap to support healthcare professionals to deliver holistic management and more personalised treatment strategies for people with difficult-to-treat RA.