Your Lupus Treatment Roadmap: Understanding New Treatment Guidelines and What They Mean for You
Our most recent episode of The Expert Series podcast “Your Lupus Treatment Roadmap: Understanding the New Guidelines and What They Mean for You” explores the newly released SLE treatment guidelines and how they might affect patient care. In the episode, the Lupus Foundation of America welcomed rheumatologist and lupus expert Dr. Cindy Aranow to discuss the newly updated American College of Rheumatology (ACR) treatment guidelines for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
- The goal of lupus treatment should be remission or very low disease activity.
- Everyone with lupus should be taking hydroxychloroquine unless there is a medical reason not to take it.
- Steroids are a vital therapy to quickly control inflammation, but should be used only when necessary.
- Standard or biologic immunosuppressant therapy should be prescribed early and long term to allow for a reduction in steroid use.
- People with lupus and their doctors should work together to decide if a treatment plan is working and make changes when necessary.
Because lupus is a complex and highly individualized disease, treatment guidelines play an important role in helping patients and doctors make treatment plans. As Dr. Aranow explains, “Treatment guidelines are just that: They’re guidelines to provide state of the art evidence on how to best treat a condition.” They are evidence-based recommendations, not rigid rules, designed to support consistent care across health care settings.
The updated ACR guidelines go beyond medication choices alone. They also address disease monitoring, prevention of long-term damage, vaccinations, bone health, cardiovascular risk and cancer screening — all essential components of comprehensive lupus management. A major shift in the new guidelines is the emphasis on clearly defined treatment goals. “The target is remission, which is absence of any clinical disease activity, or if this can’t be reached, then a state of what we call ‘low clinical disease activity,’” Dr. Aranow explains.
Another key priority is reducing long-term steroid use. While steroids can be effective in quickly controlling inflammation, they are associated with significant long-term side effects. The guidelines encourage early use of immunosuppressants to allow decreasing steroid dosage and ultimately discontinuing steroids whenever possible.
Dr. Aranow especially emphasizes the importance of shared decision-making and open communication between patients and their health care providers. “We’re at a time that we’re talking about remission and low disease activity [as goals of treatment]. These are possible. They’re attainable,” she says, pointing to advances in treatments and ongoing research.
Listen to this episode of The Expert Series to learn more about treatment guidelines, and explore additional resources and support through the National Resource Center on Lupus. The more you learn, the more informed and empowered you can become in your care.
Authored by:
April Fuller
This blog post and the lupus resources found on the National Resource Center on Lupus are, in part, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Cooperative Agreement Number NU58 DP006139. The contents are solely the responsibility of the developers. Points of view or opinions do not, therefore, necessarily represent official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Health and Human Services.
This blog post is for educational and information purposes only. Consult with your doctor/health care team for medical advice.
This episode of The Expert Series was sponsored by Astra Zeneca. The Lupus Foundation of America would like to thank Astra Zeneca for their support of education programs for people with lupus.