Pollyanna Penguin’s RA Blog
This is a blog about me, my recently diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis and my struggles to stay positive about it!Archive for NICE
More evidence that Abatacept IS effective in treating R.A.
Current NICE guidelines say that Abatacept (one of the many biologics, anti-TNFs) should not be used in R.A. patients who have not responded to other biologics. Now a Cochrane Review (a review designed to help policy makers and healthcare workers make decisions on what is and isn’t effective) says that Abatacept IS effective in R.A. treatment. NICE are already in the process of reviewing their current guidance, but a decision is not expected until June 2010. The review strongly recommends that for the moment Abatacept is not used WITH other biologics – but says nothing about use if other biologics have been tried and have failed, which suggests that perhaps NICE should be recommending it for those with rheumatoid arthritis who have failed on other anti-TNFs.
Like all anti-TNFs, how safe it is in the long term has not yet been established – because none of them have been around long enough, but the Cochrane review (by Dr. Lisa Maxwell in Ottawa) showed that patients given Abatacept were twice as likely to achieve a 50% improvement in symptoms such as pain and the number of tender and swollen joints.
In the meantime a study on intranasal administration of recombinant Human Cartilage glycoprotein-39 for treatment of R.A. has failed. Personally I don’t fancy a regular treatment via my nostrils … although if I had moderate to severe R.A. I guess I’d try anything once! However it didn’t show any improvement over placebo, so I dare say I will never need to try that one. Phew.
Another biologic makes the grade – but will NASTY sanction it?
Cimzia (certolizumab pegol), a biologic produced by UCB and administered by injection under the skin, has got the OK from the European Commission for use in rheumatoid arthritis. (It was approved by the FDA in the US in May.) It has been approved both as a combination therapy with MTX for those with moderate to severe active RA who haven’t responded to treatment with DMARDs, AND as a treatment on its own where a patient can’t use methotrexate.
Trials showed that Cimzia brought significant benefits to patients that lasted for more than two years. Clinical data also indicates that Cimzia stops disease progression – or did for the length of the trial, which was around two years.
Of course the big question for the UK (and it’s a big question for UCB as well since the UK market is quite a significant one) is will ‘NICE’ approve it for use on the NHS? I wouldn’t like to try and guess but it’ll be an interesting story to follow.
NICE refuses yet another drug for R.A.
NICE have rejected yet another R.A. drug – this time for ‘moderate to severe R.A.’ It’s RoActemra (tocilizumab), known as Actemra in the U.S. apparently.
OK, so right now this isn’t a huge personal concern for me – apart from the ’scrofulous pustule’ and other minor unpleasant side effects, the methotrexate is doing its job; but it’s a huge concern for R.A. patients in the U.K. in general, and potentially also for me personally in the future.
Here’s a link to an article about it, as there’s no point in me saying everything that’s already been said … and that I’ve already said about other drugs on this blog! In brief, and I quote: “the Committee has concluded that, at an approximate cost of £9,295 a year for a patient weighing approximately 70 kg, the therapy is just too expensive for use on the NHS and would not represent a cost-effective use of resources.”
I’d better start losing weight now, as if I ever need anti-TNFs in future NICE will probably decide it’s too expensive to fund overweight patients, as underweight patients need less drug! Well I suppose if NICE are inadvertently making me lose weight, that’s one positive benefit of them!
Rheumatoid Arthritis on Women’s Hour
There was a little feature about R.A. on Women’s Hour on radio 4 a couple of weeks ago. Nothing Earth shatteringly new for those in the know, but quite interesting. It was talking about trialling the use of rituximab early on in the disease, instead of doing as NICE now recommend and not letting people have it until they’ve failed three or four other biologics. It’s here.
One bit that caught my ear was this, a quote from Dr John Isaacs at Newcastle: “One thing that all rheumatologists are pleased about is that NICE are confirming what we’ve been saying for years, which is that we need to be more aggressive with this disease. So previously patients like Wendy would be seen perhaps once every three months, or once every six months, and now we’re being told that certainly in the early stages of the disease we need to see patients every month, and if treatments aren’t working then we need to be escalating treatments, changing therapies …”
Well I’m not sure how pleased the Norfolk and Norwich are about the new guidelines. “We can’t possibly manage to see people every three months. We’ll see you every six months if you’re lucky.”
These are the sorts of things a positive thinking, celebratory penguin will be trying not to say in Spain next week!
Hospital appointment lost …
So, as I said in my last post, I got home from a cracking weekend away to find a letter telling me that due to my health professional being on annual leave, my hospital appointment for September 2009 was being postponed … for six months. Now it won’t surprise those of you who know me that I slightly lost my rag … it’s probably sitting somewhere with my marbles.
On Monday I phoned the hospital – the receptionist was suitably puzzled, perhaps even astonished, at the amount of delay, buy all she could do was put me through to the nurse practitioners’ secretary, and all she could do was add me to the cancellation list for September. ‘If you get to the top of the list, we’ll let you know and give you an appointment.’ She didn’t sound like she thought there was much chance of that.
So I asked her who I should make an official complaint to. She told me to contact the Patient Liaison Service and she put me through. This actually was NOT how you make an official complaint, but it was nevertheless a wise decision on her part as when I eventually spoke to the PaLS lady she was excellent – and sympathetic, unlike the secretary who had probably worked as a doctor’s receptionist before getting this job, and so I ended up NOT putting in a complaint…
But before I spoke to the excellent PaLS lady, I had to do the usual leaving of a message on the answerphone, waiting for a response, not getting a response, writing a stinking complaint letter and sending it off.
In my stinking letter I explained that not only was I having this appointment canceled, but in fact when I looked back at my diary it seemed that I had actually only seen the n.p., in April 2008. This is someone I am supposed to see every six months, interspersed with six-monthly consultant appointments so that I see a ‘rheumatology health professional’ every three months.
So … if I didn’t get to see her until March 2010, that would be a gap of just under two years in what is supposed to be a six-monthly appointment schedule!
I also pointed out that NICE guidelines state that a patient whose RA is not under control should be seen monthly. I didn’t hold out much hope for that argument, and I was right – ‘Well they are only guidelines, and we have to do what we can, but …’ but hey, when NICE are on your side you’ve got make the most of it! It doesn’t happen often!
Aaaaaanyway … the rather lovely PaLS lady (who turned out to be an RA patient herself) sent my letter to the RA manager, the nurse practitioner etc. and got a response back for me within 48 hours, and phoned me for a chat. She agreed with me that saying ‘your health professional is on annual leave’ when in fact what had happened was that yes, she was on annual leave but they’d also had one nurse leave suddenly and another drastically reduce her hours (and that from a group that was only four-strong in the first place), did nothing to endear them to their patients.
She explained that if I had a serious problem I could contact the helpline. I explained (again – it was in my letter) that actually things were pretty good at the moment, BUT the registrar I saw in June said that I should see someone in three months (i.e. September) to see if I needed to up my methotrexate if it was working. Now I wouldn’t see anyone until December (my consultant appointment) and I didn’t think that was good enough. Then she said that she thought the nurse p. could probably actually sort that out over the phone and up the MTX after talking to me if she thought that was the right thing to do.
Now that would suit me just fine – getting it all sorted over the phone without having to drag myself into Norwich and waste an afternoon … so I said that was really useful to know and that I would therefore not be making an official complaint at this stage … and then we had a nice, friendly chat about RA and the local support group etc.
So it all ended very amicably and pleasantly and I went off a much happier penguin … and prepared to give ‘em hell at the beginning of September when they told me that actually they couldn’t do it over the phone. Cynical? Moi?
But wait … is that the mobile I hear ringing … Yes … it’s the nurse practitioner’s secretary …
See the next thrilling installment for what happened next …
A real breakthrough in RA treatment? Maybe!
Could the news that rituximab (MabThera) can provide dramatically improved results in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis be a real breakthrough at last? The thing I find most encouraging about the research, carried out by Prof. Paul-Peter Tak from the University of Amsterdam, is that it’s research based on a drug that’s already out there in the market, not something we’ll have to wait ten years for approval for.
Tak (which means thank-you in Norwegian, something many of us might want to say to him if this research is taken through into treatment) showed that treating patients early with rituximab and methotrexate in combination, can virtually stop the disease in its tracks. The 755 patient trial of recently diagnosed patients, most of whom had suffered the disease for less than a year, showed that nearly 2.5 times as many patients on the treatment went in to remission, compared with those treated with methotrexate alone.
Of course, like all RA treatments (to date, anyway) it doesn’t work for everyone, and so far the investigation has only been on recently diagnosed patients, but it certainly sounds encouraging. At the moment in the UK rituximab is only prescribed after failure of anti-TNF therapy, but NICE might actually take this option seriously as the cost of rituximab is about a quarter of an anti-TNF so it makes economic as well as medical sense to try rituximab first.
Here’s hoping NICE do something sensible for once!
New NICE guidelines on RA
Well it seems that NICE (the ironically named and aforementioned National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK) have done an about face on their original ‘if you try one anti-TNF and it doesn’t work, tough. You can’t have another one, ner ner ne ner ner’. They’ve released new guidelines which are actually very positive. Of course it doesn’t mean that all rheumatology departments will agree with or follow their guidelines but I suppose it’s a start. Here are some of the positives (IMO), and it’s only a very select few that resonated with me:
- Newly diagnosed people should be offered a combination DMARD therapy straight away, including methotrexate, ideally within three months of persistent symptoms. Well I don’t think I know ANYONE in the UK that was diagnosed within three months of persistent symptoms, let alone given the combination therapy option, but I’m glad if that’s going to change.
- A level of what is acceptable disease control should be agreed with the patient in advance and worked towards. HA! I’ll believe that when I see it. The nearest we come to discussing acceptable levels is ‘Really you’re not too bad. I see much worse people in here every day.’ Well yeah, and there are people much worse off than me in Africa, and indeed round the corner, but that doesn’t mean I have to be content with my lot!
- Quoting direct from the NRAS site (www.rheumatoid.org.uk) “People with RA should have access to a multidisciplinary team (MDT); this should provide the opportunity for periodic assessments of the effect of the disease on their lives ( such as pain, fatigue, everyday activities, mobility, ability to work or take part in social or leisure activities, quality of life, mood, impact on sexual relationships) and access to a named member of the MDT (for example, the specialist nurse) who is responsible for coordinating their care.” Well yeah, I have access to a multidisciplinary team. Like any team, some are fabulous (physio that I see now, occupational therapist, even if we don’t share a sense of humour, rheumatology nurse at the GP surgery), and some aren’t. One that isn’t is the one who would no doubt be ‘coordinating my care’, gawd help me, if that happened; the RA Nurse Practitioner at the hospital. I can imagine quite vividly what her assessment would be like. She would read off a form in a board voice, ‘Are you depressed? No? Good. Do you have sex? No? Good.’ And of course what’s required is that thing they don’t have time for at hospital, a CONVERSATION!
And don’t get me started on the patient guidelines – well, if you know me you know I will no doubt get started on the patient guidelines when I have time and feel up to it, but just for now I’ll say they’re absolutely appalling, patronising, insulting …you get the idea. I asked Arthritis Care for a copy. They were wonderfully efficient and friendly and sent me a copy return post, but having received them I took one look and went straight to the NICE website to find the health care professionals’ version – THAT actually told me things. I am sorry I caused paper and Arthritis Care money to be wasted. The patient guide had lots of nice white space and simple bullet points that told me that as a patient I should definitely have the right to treatment, possibly with drugs. (OK, I exaggerate, but thin doesn’t even begin to describe the level of information!)
Here’s a a link to the patient guidelines if you want a laugh or cry. And here’s a link to the healthcare professional guidelines if you actually want some information.
I’m probably being a bit harsh, but it surely can’t be that hard to have something really, really simple with links or (see page whatever) if you want further detail, instead of assuming all patients are clueless. It’s as bad as the hospital rheumy nurse giving me the very useful methotrexate book and saying, ‘but really there’s more information here than you need’. I think I should be allowed to decide that.
NASTY NICE spreads its evil message
I’m currently working on a transcription about pharmaceutical companies, and it’s hardly giving away state secrets to mention that the guy has just said that many other countries are looking to NICE, (who base their decisions on whether a drug is approved in the UK on ‘health economics’ which boils down to ‘if it’s expensive then the answer is no). This is a real concern because if more and more countries move to this model then more and more pharmaceutical and biotech companies are going to have to reconsider whether it’s worth their while developing expensive biologics such as anti-TNFs. If they decide it’s NOT worth while, where does that leave us, the patients?
This is a particular concern for RA because frequently a drug that works well for a while in one patient suddenly stops working and they need to move on to something else. I’ve posted about that before I think, regarding the NICE decision (now withdrawn for reevaluation) to refuse a further anti-TNF treatment to someone that’s already had one). So if the companies stop developing these drugs, then we’ll be in the same situation down the line as we are now – a small number of drugs to try, if NASTY even let us try them, and then bang – here comes the wheelchair.
Sorry for the lack of positivity in this post – I’m quite stressed right now! But then again, I’m stressed because I have a lot of work and I’m GLAD I have a lot of work to keep the wolf from the door in the current economic climate!
Great news! NASTY are doing something NICE
NRAS has just announced that NICE, the so called ‘National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence’ and unaffectionately known as NASTY, which is in fact a national organisation for making sure expensive drugs don’t get paid for on the National Health Service, is re-opening its enquiry into whether a patient should be allowed to try another anti-TNF drug if the first fails to work.
Admittedly this is not a total reversal of their previous Final Appraisal Document, which indicated that patients should not be allowed to try another anti-TNF if the first failed, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that a) patients who ‘failed’ on one anti-TNF frequently had success with another, as these drugs are all quite differnet and work in different ways to each other and b) a patient who had failed on this last line of treatment was likely to already be suffering from severe RA (Because in this country you can’t have an anti-TNF at all on the NHS unless your RA is severe, even though evidence suggests that the earlier you treat with an anti-TNF, the more succesful you are).
The fact that NICE have ‘backed down’ to the extent of even revisiting this is great news though, and it proves that they are forced to listen when we all stand up and shout! Thanks to NRAS and all the other organisations who appealed against the Final Appraisal Document. No thanks to my MP, who did at least stir himself to write a letter to the Minister for Health but then failed to understand her response and sent me a useless letter saying something like ‘It’s OK – this hasn’t actually been decided yet’.
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