new study – clarithomycin for RA

[Suzanne]

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00296-013-2822-0

“Rheumatology International
July 2013
Clarithromycin in rheumatoid arthritis: the addition to methotrexate and low-dose methylprednisolone induces a significant additive value

Mom of teen daughter with Poly JIA since age 2. Current med: azithromycin 250 mg MWF.

[Maz]

Suzanne, just wanted to thank you for posting this great study! 🙂

There have been some really interesting studies in the past where researchers have used biaxin (aka clarithromycin) for RA with very good results. The Turkish study of RA patients with helicobacter pylori who were put on biaxin for six months comes to mind, but there are others.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17355733

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12102474

Studies have also been run on RA with another macrolide abx only available abroad, called roxithromycin, and this one is interesting in light of the fact that it was a study conducted on newly diagnosed RA patients who had not yet been on other drugs and that correlations were drawn to these patients and high levels of oral bacteria found in the mouth and joints.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21904105

Also interesting is that Dr. Brown used clindamycin, not strictly a macrolide, but similar, and had great success with it for RA.

I have used both IV clindamycin and biaxin and have to say that my best results came with using a combination of a tetracycline with biaxin (even more so than with azithromycin). Unfortunately, biaxin is still on back-order and hard to come by in pharmacies…has been for the past year and a half! 🙁 Doxycycline is going through similar issues and tetracycline is still currently unavailable.

http://www.ashp.org/DrugShortages/Current/bulletin.aspx?id=945

http://www.cdc.gov/std/treatment/doxycyclineShortage.htm

All in all, it’s great that new studies are still popping up where various abx are demonstrating efficacy for treating RA. Now we just need to see similar for other diseases, like SD, DM/PM, Lupus, etc.

[Author]

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