Are there any new treatments for erosive osteoarthritis of the hands?

Unfortunately, the short answer is “no.” Hand OA, in general, is one of the more refractory forms of OA, and erosive OA is even more so. A variety of theoretically useful approaches have been tried, based on our understanding of inflammatory arthritis in general. However, recent placebo-controlled trials of adalimumab (Aitken et al., PMID 29499287), etanercept (Kloppenburg et al., PMID 30282670), and the IL-1-α,β inhibitor lutikizumab (Kloppenburg et al., PMID 30552176) have all failed to demonstrate benefit beyond placebo. In contrast, there have been case reports of a variety of agents that appeared helpful. However, one needs to be extremely cautious interpreting the results of uncontrolled trials of OA pain, because OA pain is extremely...