Clinical Study attributes
Tofacitinib (TOFA) is a JAK inhibitor already used in rheumatology for the treatment of moderate-to-severe active rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis in adult patients who have responded inadequately to, or who are intolerant to one or more disease- modifying antirheumatic drugs. Furthermore, TOFA has been recently approved for the treatment of adult patients with moderate-to-severe active Ulcerative Colitis (UC) who had no response, lose response, or were intolerant to either conventional therapy or a biologic agent. The approval was based on the efficacy demonstrated by TOFA in three phase 3 randomized controlled trials named OCTAVE: two identically designed, 8-week, placebo- controlled, induction studies of oral TOFA 10 mg twice daily followed by the OCTAVE Sustain 52-week maintenance study. About sacroiliitis, 2 out of 8 patients treated with TOFA improved after 8 weeks, compared with 0 out of 3 patients in the placebo group. Obviously, these data should be interpreted with extreme caution since patient numbers were very low, and it should be again emphasized that these trials were not designed to explore the efficacy of TOFA onextraintestinal manifestations. On these premises, we designed a prospective, multicenter, observational, 52-week study with the aim of assess the effectiveness of TOFA on UC-associated spondyloarthropathy.
