Is one year early, or too late? Comment on the article by Tak et al

✍ Scribed by Yrjö T. Konttinen; Dan C. Nordström; Seppo Santavirta; Ville Bergroth; Paul P. Tak; Tom J. M. Smeets; Mohamed R. Daha; Katherina A. E. Meijers; Ronald Brand; A. Edo Meinders; Ferdinand C. Breedveld

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 378 KB
• Volume: 40
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3591
• DOI: 10.1002/art.1780401037

✦ Synopsis

We appreciate Dr. Helliwell's interest in our work. Like Dr. Helliwell, we do not belicve that our data suggest that sulfasalazine is effective for axial disease in the ankylosing spondylitis patients whom we studied. We also agree that an "ideal" study population would be patients with very early disease. As we noted in our article, we tried to exclude patients with irreversible axial disease by requiring 2 4 5 minutes of morning stiffness, inflammatory back pain, and patient and physician global assessments of disease activity of "modcrate" or higher. However, we acknowledged that prolonged disease duration was a potential weakness of the study.

As part of our initial analyses, we did perform a subset analysis to determine if patients with more recent disease onset did better than those with more established disease. We found no correlation; however, very few patients in the group studied had relatively recent onset of their disease.