International Prospective Study on Adherence to Treatment in Patients With Active Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

The treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) may change in the future due to the availability of new biological treatments, especially monoclonal antibodies in patients with active disease. However, one of the main causes of treatment failure in SLE is the lack of treatment adherence since "drugs don't work in patients who don't take them." Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ-Plaquenil) has a long terminal elimination half- life, and investigators have demonstrated that patients who do not take HCQ for a long time have undetectable or very-low blood HCQ concentrations (\< 200 ng/ml). The rate of severe non-adherence was 7% in a cohort of 203 patients and was even higher in patients with active disease: 8 out of 35 (23%) in patients with a SLEDAI ≥6 and 6 out of 20 (30%) in patients with a SLEDAI ≥12. Investigators will evaluate the importance of non-adherence to the treatment in a large population of SLE patients with active disease. This will be done with blood HCQ monitoring in a translational multicentric prospective study.