MANCHESTER, England — Use of immunosuppressive drugs within 5 years of the onset of systemic sclerosis (SSc) did not lower patients’ risk for developing pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) but was associated with a significantly lower likelihood of death in patients with the complication, researchers reported at the British Society for Rheumatology (BSR) 2025 Annual Meeting.
Senior author for the study, Christopher Denton, MD, PhD, professor of experimental rheumatology at UCL Medical School and head of the Centre for Rheumatology at the Royal Free Hospital, London, England, told Medscape Medical News, “Pulmonary hypertension is one of the complications of scleroderma that has been thought traditionally not to be so inflammatory or immunologically driven. But we got an interesting signal, which was that…