[Chronopharmacological and pharmacokinetic evaluation of the therapeutic effect of naproxen in rheumatoid arthritis].

Patients with exacerbation of rheumatoid arthritis without antiinflammatory therapy demonstrated no regular circadian variations in clinical-laboratory indices of disease activity. A study of the therapeutic effect of 3 schemes with naproxen has shown that one should consider the time of development of maximum arthralgia in each individual patient and administer the drug 1 hour before it at quite a large single dose. The drug concentration in the blood plasma of the rheumatoid arthritis patients corresponded, on an average, to an administered dose showing no parallelism with a clinical effect of the drug.