DOES SULFASALAZINE HAVE FREQUENT SIDE EFFECTS IN ADULT-ONSET STILLS DISEASE?
Ja-Hun Jung, Jae-Bum Jun, Dae-Hyun Yoo, Hee Kwan Koh, Seung Cheol Shim, Dae Kook Chang, Tae-Hwan Kim, Sung Soo Jung, In Hong Lee, Sang Cheol Bae, Seong Yoon Kim The Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, Hanyang University College of Medicine, Seoul 133-792, Korea Sulfasalazine (SSZ) is widely used as a second line drug in chronic arthritis such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA). In many reports, use of SSZ in children with systemic-onset JRA (Still’s disease) revealed frequent side effects sufficient to require discontinuation of the drug. Besides, there was no controlled study for the efficacy and safety of SSZ in adult-onset Still’s disease (AOSD) as the adult counterpart of Still’s disease. We studied whether there were frequent side effects of SSZ in AOSD. From July 1990 to April 1998, we experienced 41 patients fitting Yamaguchi’s criteria for AOSD (J Rheumatol 19: 424430, 1992). We randomly chose 109 patients with RA
