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Concomitant SCIT tablet during AIT appears safe, tolerable

Use of a grass sublingual immunotherapy tablet concomitantly with subcutaneous or sublingual immunotherapy appeared safe and tolerable in patients undergoing allergy immunotherapy, according to recent research.

“No increase in frequency of adverse events compared with data from previous studies or change in the tolerability profile was observed when the SQ® grass sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) tablet [GRAZAX®; ALK-Abelló, Denmark] was administered with concomitant subcutaneous immunotherapy (SCIT) or SLIT in real life,” Rainer Reiber, from Clinical Development at ALK-Abelló Arzneimittel in Hamburg, Germany, and colleagues wrote in their study.

Reiber and colleagues evaluated 181 patients in Germany between January 2012 and January 2014 who underwent allergy immunotherapy (AIT) and also were taking a SQ® grass SLIT tablet at the same time, according to the abstract. There were 130 patients in the study undergoing SCIT and 30 patients undergoing SLIT while receiving the grass SCIT tablet. The researchers followed up with patients at initial administration and again after 1 month to 3 months of treatment, where they noted any patient-reported adverse events or adverse drug reactions.

They found that 58 patients (36.3%) experienced adverse events during AIT, with 49 patients (30.6%) attributing their adverse events to the SCIT tablet compared to 18 patients (11.3%) who attributed their adverse events to AIT, according to the abstract. Regarding adverse drug reactions, 29 patients (18.1%) reported mild or moderate adverse drug reactions, 20 patients (12.5%) reported severe reactions and treatment was discontinued for 12 patients (7.5%).

“Most frequent reactions (in ≥ 5% of patients) were oral pruritus, throat irritation, oedema mouth and paraesthesia oral followed by ear pruritus, sneezing, pruritus and dysphagia (between 3.3 and 3.9% of patients),” Reiber and colleagues wrote. “No serious ADRs … were observed.” – by Jeff Craven

Disclosure: Reiber, M. Keller and W. Keller received remuneration from ALK for the documentation of patient data from their practice for this study, Schnitker received funding from ALK, and Wolf and Wüstenberg are paid employees of ALK.