Clinical benefit of vedolizumab on articular manifestations in patients with active spondyloarthritis associated with inflammatory bowel disease

Vedolizumab (VDZ) is a new biological agent which was recently approved for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)1 following the good clinical responses reported by clinical trials for both Crohn's disease2 and ulcerative colitis.3 However, the effects of VDZ on extraintestinal manifestations were not reported in these trials, and the ‘real life’ experience is still limited. On these premises, we read with interest the recent work by Varkas et al4 reporting a series of five patients with IBD who were treated with VDZ and promptly developed new onset or exacerbation of spondyloarthritis (SpA), irrespective of the response to treatment on intestinal symptoms. Although the hypotheses proposed by the authors to explain such events sound reasonable, we would like to report our different preliminary results on the effect of VDZ on IBD-associated SpA. From June to December 2016, a treatment with...