You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 81, Issue 6
  • Two-week methotrexate discontinuation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis vaccinated with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: a randomised clinical trial

Responses

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Epidemiology
Two-week methotrexate discontinuation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis vaccinated with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: a randomised clinical trial
Compose a Response to This Article
Compose Response

More information about text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Author Information
First or given name, e.g. 'Peter'.
Your last, or family, name, e.g. 'MacMoody'.
Your email address, e.g. higgs-boson@gmail.com
Your role and/or occupation, e.g. 'Orthopedic Surgeon'.
Your organization or institution (if applicable), e.g. 'Royal Free Hospital'.
Statement of Competing Interests

PLEASE NOTE:

  • A rapid response is a moderated but not peer reviewed online response to a published article in a BMJ journal; it will not receive a DOI and will not be indexed unless it is also republished as a Letter, Correspondence or as other content. Find out more about rapid responses.
  • We intend to post all responses which are approved by the Editor, within 14 days (BMJ Journals) or 24 hours (The BMJ), however timeframes cannot be guaranteed. Responses must comply with our requirements and should contribute substantially to the topic, but it is at our absolute discretion whether we publish a response, and we reserve the right to edit or remove responses before and after publication and also republish some or all in other BMJ publications, including third party local editions in other countries and languages
  • Our requirements are stated in our rapid response terms and conditions and must be read. These include ensuring that: i) you do not include any illustrative content including tables and graphs, ii) you do not include any information that includes specifics about any patients,iii) you do not include any original data, unless it has already been published in a peer reviewed journal and you have included a reference, iv) your response is lawful, not defamatory, original and accurate, v) you declare any competing interests, vi) you understand that your name and other personal details set out in our rapid response terms and conditions will be published with any responses we publish and vii) you understand that once a response is published, we may continue to publish your response and/or edit or remove it in the future.
  • By submitting this rapid response you are agreeing to our terms and conditions for rapid responses and understand that your personal data will be processed in accordance with those terms and our privacy notice.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Vertical Tabs

Other responses

Jump to comment:

  • Published on: 16 May 2022
    ‘Correspondence on “Two-week methotrexate discontinuation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis vaccinated with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: a randomized clinical trial” by “Araujo CSR et al”‘.
    • Athanasios-Dimitrios Bakasis, MD Department of Pathophysiology, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
    • Other Contributors:
      • Haralampos M. Moutsopoulos, MD, FACP, FRCP (hc), Master ACR, Emeritus Professor

    We read with great interest the recent article written by Araujo CSR et al entitled “Two-week methotrexate discontinuation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis vaccinated with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: a randomized clinical trial” published in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases on February 22, 2022 [1]. The major impact of this trial was the reinforcement of the immunogenic effect of a 2-week methotrexate discontinuation after each dose of the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 compared to methotrexate continuation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (seroconversion rates: 78.4% vs 54.5%, p-0.019 and geometric mean antibody titers: 34.2 (25.2–46.4) vs 16.8 (11.9–23.6), p=0.003, respectively).

    Previous experience with other non-COVID-19 vaccines, like the influenza or pneumococcal vaccines, has indicated that discontinuation of immunosuppresants improves the immunogenicity of a given vaccine [2,3]. Based on this knowledge, we had proposed that it would be beneficial for patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 preferably when the underlying rheumatic disease is in remission and after temporal withdrawal of anti-metabolites within 10 days before and after each vaccine dose along with similar modifications in anti-cytokine drugs and corticosteroid dosages >10mg/ day (prednisone equivalent) [4]. In fact, applying that in a comparative study it was shown that the magnitude of antibody responses to mRNA-based S...

    Show More
    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.