How to Treat Rheumatoid Arthritis

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kayti Brosnan, I'm a registered Nurse here in Austin, Texas. And the question is, how to treat Rheumatoid Arthritis, also called RA. There are a couple of different lines that they use in treating Rheumatoid Arthritis. The first line would be your NSAIDs, that is non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. These would Motrin, Ibuprofen, Advil, those sorts of things. The second line is called DMARDs or Disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs. These are drugs that take a while to figure out exactly how they're affecting you. So working with your rheumatologist, you'll use the NSAIDs in an acute phase alongside the DMARDs. And that's going to help prevent any sort of disfigurement or disability later on in life. It's helping to prevent that and it's going to be a long term therapy. Where as the NSAIDs are more of an acute therapy. And then the third one is a little bit more recent, it's come out and it's called TNF. And what that does, is it basically is beating the inflammation to the location. So it's a chemical that's beating inflammation to the spot. And that's something that has proven to be very effective. But it's important that you have a rheumatologist go over your disease process and you disease plan and what medications are going to be best. Those are just the most common things that are being used on the market today."