Research agenda.
| Remission and expectations of reaching this state is different for patients that are newly diagnosed versus patients with longstanding disease, as it is for other demographic factors (age, sex, culture, etc.) |
| Consider splitting PtGA into a physical and emotional domain |
| Duration/sustainability of remission is very important to patients as well as to clinicians |
| How to distinguish between inflammatory vs mechanical pain? |
| Impact vs activity, the importance for the patient |
| Explore imaging/MRI as an additional measure |
| Consider separate definitions for clinical trials, clinical practice and patients |
| The word remission could imply “cure”, and could be misused by health insurance providers |
| Think of measuring patient-reported remission and its correlation to the current definition |
| How do we avoid misclassification of patients that might be in remission but have other sources of swelling or pain |
| Investigate the role of different PRO such as pain and fatigue, but also RAID as a tool to measure impact, and their relation to remission |
| Gather normative data on PRO based on age and gender |
| Take into account that there could be different states of remission, depending on demographic factors, disease duration, and irreversible damage |
| Think of qualitative research among patients to investigate face validity of the current definition (e.g., relating to 28 joint count), acceptability of the stringency and sustainability; and to develop a remission definition from the patient perspective |
PtGA: patient global assessment; PRO: patient-reported outcome; RAID: Rheumatoid Arthritis Impact of Disease