For patients with ulcerative colitis treated with infliximab, a detectable trough serum infliximab predicts clinical remission, endoscopic improvement and a lower risk for colectomy. An undetectable trough serum infliximab, irrespective of antibody status, is associated with less favourable outcomes.

Methotrexate given weekly in low doses is an effective treatment for children with resistant juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and at least in the short term this regimen is safe.

No abstract

There are few multidimensional measures of functional status in children, and none have been developed for children with juvenile arthritis (JA). This report describes an attempt to apply selected components of the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales (AIMS), which were developed and validated for adults, to a sample of children with active JA (n = 60) or inactive JA (n = 17). Our results suggest that the Pain scale and the Physical Activity scale are the most reliable measures for children with JA; the correlations of the Pain scale, Physical Activity scale, and Dexterity scale results with the clinical measures of JA diagnostic category and joint count support the convergent validity of these scales for the active JA group; and the AIMS revised Physical Disability dimension and the Pain dimension, used to predict the children's classification in the active or inactive JA group, evidence discriminant validity. Additional studies of children with a wider range of impairments are needed to further assess the usefulness of the AIMS for children with JA. Few measures exist for measuring functional status among children (l), and none have been developed specifically for studying children with juvenile arthritis (JA). However, several functional status measures, for example, the widely used Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales (AIMS), have been developed and validated for use with adult arthritis patients (2). This raises the question of whether selected components of the AIMS are potentially useful measures of the functional status of children with JA. We investigated the reliability and validity of selected AIMS components for use in evaluating children with JA, and we report the results here. PATIENTS AND METHODSAIMS instrument. Previous studies of adult arthritis patients have shown the AIMS to be a reliable and valid measure of 3 dimensions of health status: physical disability, pain, and psychological disability The AIMS dimensions and scales that were considered appropriate for children and were used in this survey of children with JA were (a) a revised Physical Disability dimension, which did not include the Household Activities scale, and (b) the Pain dimension. The component scales related to these 2