Getting Treatments for Rheumatoid Arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common form of serious inflammatory arthritis. It is a debilitating disease that causes your own immune system to attack the joints of your body. It affects about 3 people for every 10,000 every year and women about four times as often as men.
New treatment options are used fairly effectively to control the progression of the disease however. They can increase the quality of a patient’s life and prevent missed work. The treatments fall into four categories: Non-pharmacological, pharmacological drugs, biologics, and Prosorba column therapy.
Non-pharmacological treatment
These types of treatments are used to relieve the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, without targeting the cause of it, but by keeping your body strong against the disease. Non-pharmacological treatments include physiotherapy and occupational therapy.
Pharmacological drugs
Analgesics are simple pain killing drugs that allow you to go about your day normally without feeling the effects of arthritis, though it is still there. Pain relief is needed by most patients with rheumatoid arthritis in order to function as usual because the disease can cause massive joint pain.
Anti-inflammatory drugs are much like analgesics. They reduce pain by alleviating inflammation where they are administered. Taking these are important in rheumatoid arthritis because inflammation can cause massive damage and a lot of pain.
Steroids can be taken to alleviate the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. They act by signalling cells in your body to change their biochemistry in certain ways – they can tell your body to fight the disease itself.
‘Disease modifying antirheumatic drugs’ or DMARDs are more modern medications that can target cells or molecules of the immune system to attempt to control the cause of the disease. They have more side-effects than other medications, but they may be necessary in advanced cases.
Biologics
In a disease like rheumatoid arthritis, immune signalling molecules in your body called ‘cytokines’ are imbalanced. If this balance could be corrected, immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis could be halted, theoretically.
Biologics are a new and promising class of medicines which, in the case of rheumatoid arthritis, can target immune signalling molecules and eliminate them from your system. This causes your immune system to stop attacking your joints and sends the disease into remission.
Prosorba Column Therapy
Prosorba column therapy is a lot like dialysis – but instead of filtering for toxins the blood is filtered for antibodies.
The joint symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis are caused by damaging antibodies manufactured by the immune system which attack the joints. Removal of these antibodies would therefore be very beneficial in treatment. The column contains silica and an antibody-binding protein called Protein A.
Comments
I found your blog via Google while searching for rheumatoid arthritis medication, thank you for posting Treatments for Rheumatoid Arthritis | ArthritisFor Dummies!
If you want to see a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for 4/5. Detailed info, but I have to go to that damn msn to find the missed parts. Thanks, anyway!
Leave a Comment