Patients with or without prior and continued oral glucocorticoid (GC) treatment show similar efficacy and safety of subcutaneous Tocilizumab (TCZ-SC) as monotherapy or when used in combination with conventional synthetic DMARDs (csDMARDs), according to a single-arm, open-label, common-framework study programme presented in Journal of Rheumatology.

A total of 1804 patients with mild to severe RA among who the biologic or csDMARDs therapies had failed or who were MTX naïve were selected for the analysis.  The participants obtained 162 mg TCZ-SC once-weekly for ⩾24 weeks as monotherapy or in combination with ⩽10 mg/day oral glucocorticoid (GC) or csDMARDs for 24 weeks. Baseline GC use assessed the treatment subgroups for estimating safety and efficacy.

Out of 1804 participants, 208 obtained monotherapy without GC, 145 obtained monotherapy + GC, 721 obtained combination therapy without GC, and 730 obtained combination therapy + GC. The GC subgroups received 5 mg/day median GC dose. The participants who attained clinical remission (DAS28-ESR<2.6) improved similarly from baseline to week 24 in all subgroups. The patient-reported outcomes improvements were also noticed to be similar. On the whole, adverse events were commonly comparable between subgroups, with some small numerical variations between GC and non-GC subgroups. These results manifest equal outcomes of TCZ-SC among all subgroups.