There is growing evidence that ultrasound remission may not be a helpful measure in establishing treat-to-target strategies in rheumatoid arthritis, EULAR delegates were told.

Dr Alexandre Sepriano from the Leiden University Medical Centre presented two year findings from the observational BIODAM study involving a subset of 130 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treated under a treat to target protocol.

He found that a combined clinical and ultrasound benchmark for T2T decreased the likelihood of clinical remission after 3 months by 61% when compared with the conventional strategy of T2T using clinical remission measures [OR (95% CI): 0.39 (0.24; 0.63].

Dr Sepriano said it was unclear why the use of ultrasound led to worse outcomes for patients, but noted that results from two randomised trials had also shown that ultrasound offers no additional benefit (see our story here ) .

He said the results should stress to clinicians the importance of following a treat to target strategy according to a patient’s clinical data.

“Adding ultrasound does not appear to be advantage in this scenario,” he told delegates.

The researchers used multiple definitions of remission, including the 28-joint and 44-joint disease activity scores and the EULAR /ACR Boolean criteria.