When Your RA Biologic Stops Working

Biologics can become less effective over time, due to either neutralizing antibodies or progressing disease. We do suggest that you use standard pharmaceuticals first. Those are usually the baseline of what we use.

We start with them and the usual one is methotrexate. But there are others that we can try for one reason or another. And actually they may keep the patient from having neutralizing antibodies that would make the biologic less effective as time goes on.

If your disease is getting worse and you're on a biologic, it could be that you've got neutralizing antibodies. And then we would more likely change therapy. As you get older, you can expect that very likely you're going to have a change in treatment over time. It would be either with the conventional medicines or with the biologics. And the disease can progress more and we would change the biologic for that.