VIDEO: Assessing long-term risks and benefits of RA treatments

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It's really the individual in front of me. If it's someone who has chronic kidney disease, for instance, or who has liver disease, or who's living with a new diagnosis of a malignancy, or someone who is of childbearing age and considering pregnancy, for instance. So there are a lot of different, very patient-specific factors. There's some therapies I wouldn't even bring up as options because they are too risky or they're contraindicated for our patients. And the long-term risk, I think it's really important to convey and communicate to patients that these are the potential risks, these are the steps we're going to take to mitigate those risks, making sure we do your monitoring labs, making sure that all of the preventative care is done in terms of vaccinations, in terms of managing the comorbid cardiovascular risks, for instance if they have comorbid pulmonary disease, to make sure that that's acknowledged and discussed, talking about smoking cessation when that's appropriate in terms of that contributing to potential risk going forward. So, again, I think it's very patient-specific. It's very context-specific, but the clear communication from the get-go, in terms of whenever I discuss an option, there are the benefits and there are the potential harms and making sure that's clear in every conversation, and emphasizing the importance of monitoring and seeing people with relative frequency every 3 to 6 months to make sure that we're not missing something that's developed.