New therapeutic approaches for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis may rise from the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway and antinociceptive pathway.

Due to the complex etiology of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), it is difficult to be completely cured at the current stage although many approaches have been applied in clinics, especially the wide application of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). New drug discovery and development via the recently discovered cholinergic anti-inflammatory and antinociceptive pathways should be promising. Based on the above, the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonists maintain the potential for the treatment of RA. Therefore, new therapeutic approaches may rise from these two newly discovered pathways. More preclinical experiments and clinical trials are required to confirm our viewpoint.