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Rheumatoid arthritis treatment is typically being stopped weeks before procedure despite half-lives of drugs being much shorter
CHICAGO I When rheumatoid arthritis patients being treated with biologic agents undergo surgery, doctors often arbitrarily impose cut-off times for the drugs. However, those stop times do not appear to consider the drugs' half-lives.
"We need to do more studies to see if more pharmacologically based timing of when you hold these medications might potentially decrease rates of postoperative flares," said Dr. Lisa Mandi, an attending rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Dr. Mandi suggested that inappropriate stop times used to avoid possible infections expose patients to rheumatoid arthritis disease flares.
She said the risk of infection is an important consideration when patients undergo major surgical procedures such as total knee replacement, but her retrospective study indicates a disconnect between stop...