A small implanted device that stimulates the vagus nerve modestly reduced rheumatoid arthritis activity in a randomized, sham-controlled trial. In the RESET-RA study, 242 patients whose disease had not responded to biologic or targeted drugs received either active or sham stimulation for three months. The primary measure — an ACR20 response, meaning at least 20% symptom improvement — reached 35.2% with active stimulation versus 24.2% with sham (P=0.0209), an 11-percentage-point edge. Response rose to 50.0% at six months and 52.8% at twelve, though those later figures come from an open-label phase with no sham comparison. Adverse events were similar between groups. Why it might matter: it points toward a drug-free option for people who have exhausted conventional treatments. But the blinded benefit is modest, ACR20 is a low bar, and the durable-looking gains lack a control arm — so how much reflects the device rather than expectation remains genuinely uncertain.^[1]

Source

1. Tesser JRP, et al. Vagus nerve-mediated neuroimmune modulation for rheumatoid arthritis: a pivotal randomized controlled trial. Nature Medicine. 2025. doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04114-7