Study: Patients With Pain in Spine and Joints Show Marked Improvement With Enbrel

Patients taking the drug Enbrel® (etanercept) to treat active ankylosing spondylitis, a painful inflammatory disease affecting the spine and the joints, showed marked improvement as early as two weeks after beginning treatment, according to researchers.

The findings were presented June 19 at the annual meeting of European League Against Rheumatism in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ankylosing spondylitis is a painful, chronic and progressive inflammatory disease affecting the spine and the joints and ligaments that normally allow a person's back to move and flex. Over time, the disease can cause a patient's vertebrae to fuse together, causing complete loss of motion and a stooped-over posture. The disease affects about 350,000 people in the United States.

Researcher Dr. John Davis, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, said Enbrel is the first treatment to show improvement in these patients' range of spinal motion.

The study involved 277 patients who either received Enbrel or a placebo over a 6-month period. The patients taking Enbrel experienced significant and rapid reduction in back pain and morning stiffness and improvement in spinal mobility and physical function. Patients reached maximum relief within the first two months of the study and experienced sustained results for the remainder of the six-month study.

"When we measured spinal mobility and back pain, the most debilitating aspects of ankylosing spondylitis, we found that patients treated with Enbrel experienced significantly greater improvement in mobility than patients receiving placebo and a 50 percent reduction in spinal pain," said Davis.

Davis said the drug also had a positive impact on many patients' ability to accomplish everyday tasks, such as being able to more easily put on socks or look over their shoulders without turning their bodies.

Adverse events were similar to those reported in previous clinical trials of Enbrel with injection site reactions occurring more frequently than in the placebo group.

Other sources: Amgen, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals