About Rheumatoid Arthritis Medications

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kayti Brosnan and today I'm going to tell you a little about rheumatoid arthritis medications and the treatments that they're using. There's a couple of different treatments that they use either alone or together. The first line are NSAIDs or Non Steroidal Anti Inflammatory Drugs. These include Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Motrin, Naproxen and they're going to treat the acute situation. So they'll treat the pain, they treat the acute inflammation, the redness, the warmth, the swelling; all of that. Sometimes these also includes corticosteroid injections which will either go directly into the muscle or directly into the joint. But these are things that really are use in an acute setting; if you're using them over longer periods of time, there's a lot of side effects with them. So a lo of times they'll use these along side DMARDs which are Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatic Drugs and there's a whole, there's a whole slow of them; but they act the best when they're with a first line being the NSAIDs and the corticosteroids. So the DMARDs will actually slow the effect of rheumatoid arthritis overtime and they can help prevent any sort of disability or degeneration or defect that the RA is causing to the joints or the muscles. Another form is the third class and it's called TNF or Tumor Necrosis Factor and this is something that usually is only use with one TNF at a time but they'll also use that with the DMARD. Now these are a lot of big words; it's just letting you know that there are different ways of treating it in different classes that they're using and that a lot of the research is always evolving and their finding better more efficient, less side effects to the medications that they're using. There's also a lot of studies that show that if you change your diet, that you exercise, that you limit the stress and you're working with a, a physical therapist, that you can have a lot of really good effects from that. So those are some of the treatments and medicines that they're using today for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis."