Kickas.org Forums Ankylosing Spondylitis General Discussion #1 AS Web Support Group I'm Starting A New Oral Biologic!!

Hi doh...I'm glad you posed that question, I'm wondering if the surgery has has something to do with it too...maybe too much of an overload on my immune system...I'm still seeing benefits from the drug in other areas though and that makes me think that the reason that it's not helping my pain is that I'm probably on the low dose....after reading the results from the first phase of the clinical trials again, I realised that the improvement that I've seen from the drug is consistent with the improvement seen in the patients on the 10mg dose which is targeted at psoriasis, the second phase is to see if higher doses of the drug can help people with inflammatory diseases...so, considering that, I'm hopeful that when the doses are raised, in just a couple of weeks, that I'll get relief from my pain...I will have to be careful though to differentiate between the benefit of the heavy pain meds that I'll be on post-op and the drug....also doh, I think the reason my stiffness is an issue again is due to the lack of activity and the amount of time I spend in bed while recovering from surgery...I had seen an improvement in my morning stiffness and energy levels initially....but no, they would not have switched me to placebo, after you pose the question, I went back and reviewed the program outline and they up the dose on everyone in the study at planned intervals, but no dose lowering at any phase....just a note, with a lot of the other medications a lot of patients go into a flare when the medication is discontinued, follow up studies on the first phase subjects, there was no rebound reported on any of the subjects, which is fantastic because rebound flares are usually worse that regular flares, so this is great news.....

Happy Thanksgiving!!