Enbrel Seems to Be Effective for Severe Sciatica

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Enbrel Seems to Be Effective for Severe Sciatica

Wed 8 September, 2004 21:29

By Will Boggs, MD

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The anti-rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel may

relieve symptoms of acute, severe sciatica -- pain that radiates down the

leg from a pinched or inflamed nerve in the spine.

That word comes from Dr. Stephane Genevay and colleagues at the University

Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland, who conducted a pilot study of the

effectiveness of three subcutaneous injections of Enbrel, given 3 days

apart, in ten patients admitted to hospital with severe sciatica.

Ten days after treatment and continuing for 6 weeks, all the patients showed

significant improvements on a visual analog scale for leg pain and on two

measures of disability, the authors report in the ls of the Rheumatic

Diseases.

A comparison group of ten other sciatica patients who participated in an

earlier study of steroid injections showed similar, but less marked,

improvements after 10 days. However, by 6 weeks these patients fared

significantly worse than Enbrel patients, the researchers found.

Overall, they note, 90 percent of the Enbrel group met their definition of a

good clinical result versus only 30 percent of the steroid group.

" This may be a promising approach for patients suffering from sciatica, "

Genevay told Reuters Health, " but results are still preliminary and

physicians should not start to treat patients with this kind of treatment

unless it is done in a carefully planned research. "

Genevay commented that a multicenter clinical trial with a similar drug,

Humira, " should begin within a couple of months in Switzerland. "

SOURCE: ls of the Rheumatic Diseases, September 2004.