Fig. 1.

The prototypical DMARDs. Drugs marked with ‘×’ were subject to review as either “disease-modifying” or “remission-inducing” drugs in the four publications that first employed these labels (Gumpel 1976; Bunch and O’Duffy 1980; Anastassiades 1980; Hunneyball 1980). In addition to the drugs on which these reviews focused, a number of other compounds were mentioned either for their anecdotal use (a) or as being researched (r). In the category (a) was the cancer drug methotrexate, which was later to become a mainstay anti-rheumatic DMARD following the publication of a study published by Hoffmeister (1983); its use in the treatment of RA was going to be approved by the FDA in 1988. (See also Whitehouse 2005, p. 2936; Weinblatt 2013, p. 17)