English summary: How do we treat rheumatoid arthritis in Finland?

According to the recommendations of the European League against Rheumatism (EULAR), the treatment of early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) should be initiated with methotrexate monotherapy combined with low dose prednisolone. If the target of treatment (remission) is not achieved within three to six months, a TNF blocker should be added.

In Finland, nearly all practising rheumatologists in the 1990s participated in the FIN-RACo Trial, the results of which were published in 1999. This was later followed by the Neo-RACo Trial, conducted by more or less the same group. Due to the results favouring the treatment of early RA with a combination of synthetic DMARDs, this combination treatment has become widely used in Finland.

A grant from the Medcare Foundation made it possible to explore the current treatment strategies for early RA in Finland with a Delphi-method. A group of 23 expert rheumatologists were asked to fill in a questionnaire designed by a facilitator group. The structured questionnaire inquired about the practice of treatment of early RA. The anonymous answers were statistically analyzed, and the statistics were sent as feed-back to the experts. Eighteen of them participated in a workshop in May 2012, and voted anonymously on treatment strategies for early RA.

In early RA, the Finnish experts would only prescribe monotherapy for 10-20 % of the patients, while 20-30% would receive a combination of two DMARDs, and the remaining 60-70% a combination of three DMARDs (methotrexate, sulphasalazine, and hydroxychloroquine). Low dose prednisolone, mostly 7.5 mg daily, would be prescribed to 80% of the patients, the rest would receive only intra-articular corticosteroid injections. Methotrexate would be started at 10 mg weekly but escalated to 20 mg weekly after one month and then to 25 mg weekly by mouth or subcutaneously. If RA was still active after 6 months of treatment with a maximum tolerated combination of synthetic DMARDs, 87% of the experts would add a biologic drug, mostly a TNF inhibitor.