Easier access to treatment for young arthritis sufferers, urges charity
The Arthritis Research Campaign is calling for effective new treatment to be made available for a form of inflammatory arthritis that affects young men, during its winter awareness week (January 3-8 2006).
Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is one of the few types of arthritis to affect more men than women and to occur in people in their late teens and early twenties. Around 60,000 people in the UK are affected. The main symptoms are excruciating pain in the lower back, which leads to progressive stiffness, restricted movement and lack of mobility. It also causes crippling fatigue.
Patients with severe disease, around ten per cent of sufferers, are known to benefit enormously from a breakthrough treatment called anti-TNF therapy, which has been licensed for AS since 2003 but is not expected to be reviewed by NICE until February 2007.
That means that hospital trusts and primary care trusts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are not required to fund the treatment, which costs around £10,000 per patient per year. In Scotland, the Scottish Medicines Consortium has just recommended the use of infliximab and etanercept for ankylosing spondylitis.
But according to the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc), whose scientists developed anti-TNF therapy in the 1990s, although some trusts are making funding available, the overall picture is very patchy, leaving many people with AS unable to access drugs which could transform their lives.
"Some patients are lucky enough to get this treatment but many other AS sufferers are not so fortunate. We would urge NICE to speed up its approval process so that other people can benefit from the extraordinary transformation that these drugs can bring to AS patients,"said Professor Paul Wordsworth of arc.
"We are having to battle for every patient and it's completely inappropriate to apply the NICE guidelines in this way; to exclude clinicians from using proven and licensed agents which have very good trial data. Most people with AS are of working age who have to give up work and go onto on State benefits. If they got the treatment they needed and which is available, many would be able to go back to work."
