Simple Blood Test to Define Disease Activity in Rheumatoid Arthritis Would Be a Game Changer

With the advent of new, more-potent therapies for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the treatment goal has become remission or very low disease activity. Many validated clinical disease–activity tools are used to monitor RA disease activity, but a blood test that could accomplish this monitoring easily and objectively would be attractive. In the past few years, a blood test with a simple draw that measures 12 different biomarkers (Vectra DA) has been touted as defining disease activity.

To determine whether Vectra DA results correlate with standard clinical outcomes, researchers evaluated data from 497 patients with results from Vectra DA and from four standard clinical measures during 2 years. Patients received either abatacept (Oren…