The rapid kinetics of optimal treatment with subcutaneous methotrexate in early inflammatory arthritis: an observational study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Methotrexate (MTX) is standard treatment for RA. Absorption is better in subcutaneous MTX (scMTX), which may impact speed of onset. In RA, earlier time to remission improves long-term results. Our objectives were to determine rapidity of response of subcutaneous methotrexate in early rheumatoid arthritis. METHODS: The change in several disease activity measures (including DAS28) from 0 to 6 weeks (early period) and 6 to 12 weeks (late period) was compared. The proportion achieving DAS28/CDAI/SDAI remission and/or low disease activity state was also compared. RESULTS: One hundred three patients were included from a single site between 2008 and 2014. All received MTX (98.0 % scMTX, 98 % 25 mg/week). There were no dropouts. There was a significantly greater early change in DAS28 (-1.9 vs. -0.2, p < 0.00); this effect was seen for several outcome measures. By 6 weeks, 59 % had achieved either DAS28 remission or low disease activity state, with 74 % achieving either state by 12 weeks. There were a larger proportion of patients achieving CDAI and DAS28 remission in the early versus late period (p < 0.0002 for both). There was significant improvement when using combination MTX and HCQ, however sample size was small (n = 9). The use of intra-articular steroids with MTX yielded the most disease measures that demonstrated early significant improvement. CONCLUSION: Subcutaneous MTX is rapid, as the change in many disease activity scores was significantly greater between 0-6 weeks compared to 6-12 weeks. Combination MTX + HCQ gave added value, although generalizability is limited by combination cohort sample size. Intra-articular steroid injections may contribute to the early effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".