Featuring Dr. John Wade, MD, FRCPC, Rheumatologist

Duration: 1 minute, 16 seconds

Monitoring for methotrexate is an important aspect if you’re going to go on methotrexate, and your rheumatologist or your doctor will want to have a lot of discussion about that with you. One of the most important things is that you do regular blood test monitoring.

There will be a set of blood tests that your doctor will do at baseline, to ensure there’s no liver damage, and in addition your doctor will want to do regular blood testing, and different people will do it different ways.

Your rheumatologist may do it once a month, or may do it once every two or three months. So there will be a discussion you will need to have with your rheumatologist about how frequently you’ll do that monitoring.

There are newer ways now to monitor in terms of safety of methotrexate. And in the future - it may not be in your community yet, but in the future we’ll be doing a test called a FibroScan or a test to look at if there’s any scarring or damage to your liver, and this will be one way of helping your doctor decide whether or not you have any damage to your liver on a long-term basis.

If you have any questions or concerns about methotrexate, you should contact your healthcare practitioner or your specialist.

Presenter: Dr. John Wade, Rheumatologist, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Rheumatologist