Ab0232 Managing Early Arthritis in Clinical Practice: Structured and Prompt Intervention Leverages Window of Opportunity and Leads to Excellent Clinical Outcomes

Background: Inflammatory arthritides and other rheumatic diseases often present with clinical arthritis, leading to a significant personal and societal burden. Early arthritis clinics have been established worldwide to identify and treat patients within a window of opportunity, expecting to improve outcomes. Objectives: To describe the organization of our early arthritis clinic, which manages patients with untreated inflammatory arthritis with less than 12 months of symptoms. Methods: We included patients followed-up in our early arthritis clinic from 2015 to 2022. We collected demographic and clinical variables, including symptom duration, disease activity, treatment and final diagnosis. Patients were followed-up for up to 12 months, with visits at months 0, 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12. All patients were treated with short-term glucocorticoids and conventional synthetic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (csDMARDs) with a treat-to-target approach. We herein report the proportion of patients achieving clinical remission, defined by Disease Activity Score 28-joints with 4 variables C-reactive protein (DAS-28-4V-CRP), at month 6 and 12 of follow-up. Results: We assessed 292 patients in our clinic between 2015 and 2022. Mean (SD) symptom duration at baseline was 57.8 (16.0) months, with a mean DAS28-CRP of 3.5 (1.0) (Table 1). Seropositive (40.1%) and seronegative (17.3%) rheumatoid arthritis were the most common diagnoses, followed by psoriatic arthritis (12.4%). Most patients were treated with prednisolone (88.1%) and methotrexate (75.3%), while a short number of patients received leflunomide (4.5%), sulfasalazine (9.4%) and hydroxychloroquine (12.9%). Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) improvement was 1.5 ± 0.4 points. As a whole, 83.7% of the patients achieved remission (DAS28-CRPConclusion: Our early arthritis clinic allowed for the prompt orientation, diagnosis, and treatment of patients with recent onset arthropathies. This has resulted in a high percentage of patients reaching disease remission, in accordance with a window of opportunity for timely treatment and improved outcomes. Our work highlights the relevance of early arthritis clinics in tertiary rheumatology centers. REFERENCES: NIL. Acknowledgements: NIL. Disclosure of Interests: None declared.