...Anybody out there with experience of this drug, and perhaps a little light for the end of the tunnel ?
I have been on 2g/day of sulfasalazine for a year or two, with monthly blood-monitoring tests, and also took 3g/day (with no testing) for about a year c.1981, as an anti-inflammatory for ulcerative colitis. I noticed no effects apart from intermittent bright yellow urine (and the late discovery from a newspaper article that it was a promising male contraceptive).
(Enormous quantities of steroids and then drastic surgery fixed the colitis!)My understanding of its use in PA has been that no noticeable positive effects are to be expected. The hope, based on promising results in rheumatoid arthritis (with similar symptoms to PA) is that it will
delay the progress of PA, and is therefore a welcome and fairly innocuous addition to the rather small range of more drastic possible drug treatments. If my information is correct, it is a prophylactic measure; one will never know whether it worked for an individual or not, because you can't tell how bad the PA would have been without it. It's a bit like taking anti-malarials.
It's also a lot more sensible than taking vitamin pills, which millions of people do, just in case they're good. If you're deficient they'll do you good; if not they're useless and potentially poisonous.
If any lurking rheumatologist knows better than this from further studies since I started on it, please tell us, preferably with literature references! I'm seeing my friendly local rheumatologist next week for my 6-monthly visit, and I'll ask her if there's anything new in the literature.
