Philip Mease, MD: Achieving Goals in Psoriatic Arthritis Treatment

For patients living with active psoriatic arthritis, joint and axial symptom relief is achievable according to recent research. Results from a 2 year-long clinical trial show that guselkumab (Tremfya) provided continuous improvement across measures of health-related quality of life.

"This is a really good time for us to be able to treat psoriatic arthritis," study author Philip Mease, MD, said. "We have quite a few tools in our tool chest now with numerous medications, different mechanisms of action to treat all of the different domains of the disease."

Philip Mease, MD, Director of Rheumatology, Swedish Medical Center/Providence St. Joseph Health, and Clinical Professory, University of Washington, joined HCPLive for an interview to discuss the pivotal data.

"The goal of getting to a target of treatment of either low disease activity or remission, so that they can, when they go out into the day, leave the disease behind them and try to return to a more normal life," Mease said. "That's really a goal that we have, and we can achieve it, at least for a period of time with many of our drugs now."

He explained how this guselkumab clinical trial is an example of how much progress has been made in the field of rheumatology.

"It's so different than when I was in practice 30 years ago, or even when I started practice, 40 years ago," Mease said, "the tools that we had then were just–all we could do basically was hold the patient's hand as they gradually deteriorated–and now things have really changed. And the ability to completely control psoriasis so that they're not so embarrassed to go out in public, that's a big deal as well."