@jrp11948 and @321design -- good morning -- may I ask - are you in a Groundhog Day loop ? each morning you wake up with stiffness , take your Prednisone, feel a little better and then start all over again the next morning? That is what I wanted to put an end to --and so my dose was increased to 30mg from 20mg ( the rheumatologist's plan) with a split dose- resulted in the miraculous relief for the PMR morning pain and stiffness after experiencing a terrible flare up.

You might be interested to read the descriptions of PMR pain and stiffness in the attached paper- I know I did !

And - the description of the "classes" of patients and and how they respond to Prednisone is in this Muller paper ( 2020) with a follow up in 2022. The concern is predicting who will relapse ....... the graphs are difficult to interpret at first. The tapering of prednisone can be gleaned from the table(s), it was quite slow in this study according to my calculations.

My journey started a year ago- ( shout out to all the PMR connections I have "met" here) - I have tapered to 3mg/day - woo hoo !! knock wood - I think I am a cluster 4 patient : Rapid and sustained recovery

In addition, this thread started long ago , so I can't quite tell when you each were Dx w PMR - have you looked at this site : https://www.pmrandil6.com ?? scroll over to the resources Tab and down and find the videos.

@jrp11948 I had to look up Plaquenil : this is from the ACR site : Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) is a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD). It can decrease the pain and swelling of arthritis which can prevent joint damage leading to long-term disability. Hydroxychloroquine is in a class of medications that was first used to prevent and treat malaria but today is the standard drug in lupus. It can be used in many other autoimmune diseases. It is not fully clear of its mechanism of action, but the current thought is that it interferes with communication in the immune system.