Improvement in insulin resistance is greater when infliximab is added to methotrexate during intensive treatment of early rheumatoid arthritis-results from the IDEA study

What Was Tested

Researchers studied BNP (Nesiritide) in the context of insulin resistance, prediabetes & type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To determine the change in established biomarkers of cardiovascular (CV) risk, namely, total cholesterol/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ratio (TC/HDL-C), N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) and insulin resistance (IR) in patients with early RA treated with two different treat-to-target strategies.

Why It Was Studied

EU Clinical Trials Register, http://www.clinicaltrialsregister.eu, Eudract-2005-005013-37; ISRTCNregisrty, http://www.isrctn.com, ISRCTN48638981.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as young adults, adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Fasting glucose, lipids, insulin and NT-proBNP were measured at baseline, weeks 26 and 78 in 79 DMARD-naïve RA patients, free of CV disease, as part of a double-blind randomized controlled trial of MTX with either infliximab (IFX) or methylprednisolone as induction therapy.

Homeostasis model assessment-estimated IR (HOMA-IR) (glucose*insulin/405) was used to measure IR.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and double-blind study.

Because people in this BNP (Nesiritide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on BNP (Nesiritide), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Multiple imputation was employed, and linear regression analyses were adjusted for baseline values.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Aftercare, Antirheumatic Agents, Arthritis, Rheumatoid, Biomarkers, Blood Glucose, Cardiovascular Diseases and Cholesterol, HDL.

The authors tagged it with the keywords N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide, cardiovascular risk, infliximab, insulin resistance, methotrexate and rheumatoid arthritis.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of BNP (Nesiritide) in people with insulin resistance, prediabetes & type 2 diabetes.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2016 (Rheumatology (Oxford, England)), a journal based in England.

More context: the BNP (Nesiritide) compound page, Insulin resistance, prediabetes & type 2 diabetes research, Rheumatoid arthritis research.