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.

Modern treatments are available and viable, however, and you should know the options. These treatments can work to improve quality of life, slow disease progression, and prevent work disability. The newest treatments you should know about are in four different categories: Non-pharmacological treatments, pharmacological drugs, biologics, and Prosorba column therapy.

Non-pharmacological treatment

Non-pharmacological treatments focus on relieving the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis by strengthening your body against the disease or preventing symptoms of the disease from displaying in the first place by changing your environment. These include therapies such as physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

Pharmacological drugs

Analgesics can be used to relieve the painful symptoms of arthritis. They simply numb the pain at the site of join inflammation (or in your entire body), but do not actually treat the disease.

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 newer drugs which can target the actual cause of symptoms in rheumatoid arthritis, by altering the concentration of immune system - related molecules in the body. They have more serious side effects than other drugs, but they may be necessary for extreme cases.

Biologics

In an immune disease like rheumatoid arthrits, immune signalling molecules in your body called ‘cytokines’ are generally imbalanced. If they could somehow be brought back to a normal balance, the disease could theoretically be stopped in its tracks.

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.

These damaging antibodies are what causes an attack in the joints of patients. Removal of these antibodies results in relief from the disease for months. The column contains silica and a protein which binds antibodies called Protein A.