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During the congress, E-Posters will be accessible to all participants on the congress website 24/7, as well as in the E-poster stations in the congress center.
Preparing your E-Poster
Please review the E-Poster format requirements carefully when preparing your E-Poster. Should your E-Poster not meet the mentioned requirements, it may not be displayed as described above.
E-Poster Submission Deadline
Please prepare and upload your E-Poster no later than March 14, 2026 11.59PM CET. After this date, you will no longer be able to prepare and upload your E-poster and it will not be displayed and accessible on the congress website.
Please follow the instructions below to input your abstract title.
Abstract titles should be brief and reflect the content of the abstract.
Rituximab and cyclophosphamide remain the cornerstone of initial treatment in ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV). Yet, their comparative effectiveness remains underdetermined in the literature. Several key gaps remain unexplored, including assessing treatment efficacy and safety, determining the optimal duration of therapy to minimise relapse while reducing treatment-related adverse effects, and conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis. The objective of this systematic review was to compare the efficacy and safety of rituximab with cyclophosphamide, especially in different subtypes of AAV.
For this PROSPERO-registered systematic review (CRD420251019602), the literature was searched on PubMed, Cochrane Library, LILACS, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure databases, looking for randomized trials and quasi-experimental studies published up to April 10, 2025. Other inclusion criteria included adolescents/ adult patients with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated vasculitis, having positive serum antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody assays. Exclusion criteria included use of additional immunosuppressants (other than glucocorticoids) during the induction phase, studies on patients with malignancies within the past five years, chronic viral infections, or known hypersensitivity to monoclonal antibodies, as well as case reports/ series, observational studies, case-control, or cohort studies. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 tool.
d, Of the 919 records identified, 91 were duplicates. During title and abstract screening, 815 records were excluded (Figure 1). Full text could not be arranged for one of the 13 remaining records. Following full-text screening, six records were excluded for the reasons outlined in the PRISMA flow diagram. Finally, one study and five additional records were included in this review. Among 197 patients, rituximab (375mg/m2 intravenously, four doses, one week apart) was non-inferior to oral cyclophosphamide (2 mg/kg/day) in inducing remission at six months, superior in inducing remission after relapses, and non-inferior in maintaining complete remission at 18 months, with similar relapse rates. The essential characteristics of these records are shown in Table 1. Patients aged ≥65 years had more severe adverse events as compared to younger patients. Proteinase-3 positivity predicted failure to attain remission at 6 months. Among patients with proteinase-3 positivity, rates of complete remission were higher with rituximab rather than cyclophosphamide for up to 18 months. The risk of bias in the included study was low.
Rituximab has an efficacy comparable to cyclophosphamide for the initial treatment of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated vasculitis. It outclasses the latter in patients with proteinase-3 positivity. The follow-up period of the included study was too short to allow detection of long-term side effects.
