Auranofin: A New Drug for Rheumatoid Arthritis

Excerpt

The use of gold compounds in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis seems to have arisen because of the resemblance of chronic rheumatoid arthritis to chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Since the turn of the 20th century, when Koch (1) described the in-vitro inhibition of tubercle bacilli by gold cyanide, until the late 1920s, gold compounds were used widely, if ineffectually, in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. In 1935, Forestier (2) reported their use in more than 550 patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Since then, the efficacy of gold used in the United States, mainly in the form of either aurothioglucose