Treatment Patterns of Rheumatoid Arthritis in Japanese Hospitals and Predictors of Initiation Biologic Agents

Abstract

≤ 60 years) and lower for patients with a high comorbidity score (HR 1.13; 95%CI 1.05-1.60 for CCI score 3-5 compared to CCI score ≤ 2). We found a high variation of persistence between different drugs. ConClusions: Japanese RA patients have a high persistence rate of biologic treatments. However, multi-factors affect the persistence rate of Japanese patients including age, comorbidities and patient type. Naïve patients tend to have high persistence rate than continuing biologic patients.

The underrated prevalence of depression in Japanese patients with rheumatoid arthritis - evidence from a Nationwide survey in Japan

“…Usually, people that are more familiar with the Internet take part in online surveys which are in turn younger and probably better educated. On the other hand, the average age of our sample (54.28 years) does not differ much from a recent Japanese claims database analysis with more than 16,000 RA patients [41]. In that study the average patient age was 53.96 years which makes us believe that the potential selection bias in our sample is low.…”