Moving to biological treatment

Moving To Biological Treatment

Dr. Irwin Lim
Rheumatologist

The biologic medications are very costly and because of this, there are a whole bunch of rules to actually be able to prescribe biologic medications. This is why your rheumatologist will typically need to trial older medications before being able to access these newer medications for you.

Dr. Mona Marabani
Rheumatologist
President, Australian Rheumatology Association

Well the minimum period of intensive treatment before a person can actually qualify under the regulations for a biologic is six months. So the shortest period of time that we have to use other therapies to try and gain control is six months. Now my take on this is that I’m going to try very hard to control your disease on ordinary synthetic drugs. Now that’s not a view that’s shared by everybody. Some people feel that the most important thing to do is to escalate as quickly as possible and get to a biologic. But the key message is to control the disease, is to put that person hopefully into a remission or low disease activity and actually how you do that doesn’t really matter. It’s getting to the endpoint that matters.

Dr. Samuel Whittle
Rheumatologist, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide

A lot of patients with diseases like rheumatoid arthritis for example, in fact won’t ever need biologic drugs because they will do so well with our established treatments like methotrexate that they don’t need them. But one of the great advantages that we’ve seen with the biologics is it has simply given us more weapons that we can use to help treat the diseases in people who haven’t responded to the existing DMARDs like methotrexate.

Linda Bradbury
Nurse Practitioner, Rheumatology, University of Queensland
President, Rheumatology Health Professionals Australia

These drugs aren’t suitable for everybody and that’s going to be a choice that your specialist will discuss with you. It very much depends on your history and whether you have a history of other conditions. There are things to be aware of when you’re taking these medications. As with a lot of medications as well there are side effects. Because they’re affecting these particular cells in your immune system, it does mean that you can be more prone to infections and so you have to be very aware of that and be aware of the risk of infections and see your GP early if you think you’re unwell.