The etiology, pathogenesis, treatment, and development of transdermal drug delivery systems for rheumatoid arthritis

Abstract

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a long-term autoimmune disease that causes irreversible deformity of joints and disability of body parts. The symptoms include synovial tissue inflammation and cartilage and bone damage. To reduce the inflammation, therapeutic drugs are often used to target and limit the inflammation factor. Nonetheless, there are significant problems with the treatment such as a first-pass effect, gastrointestinal side effects, skin stratum corneum barrier, etc. Hence, a transdermal delivery system (TDDS) is applied for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis as it increases the effectiveness of the drugs by overcoming the difficulties mentioned above. This paper reviews the research progress of transdermal drug delivery for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and explores the details of dosage forms such as gel, patch, drug microneedles, nanostructured lipid carriers and drug-loaded electrospun nanofibers, which provide numerous ideas for these dosage forms in RA treatment when using transdermal drug delivery methods.