Patients with psoriasis experienced frequent treatment disruptions during 1-year period

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — There were more patients with psoriasis who switched or restarted therapy in a 1-year period than there were patients remaining on continuous therapy, according to research presented at the World Congress of Dermatology.

“Approximately 547,000 moderate-to-severe psoriasis patients remain untreated,” presenter April W. Armstrong, MD, MPH, told Healio.com/Dermatology. “Among those who have been treated, many experienced treatment disruptions.”

April W. Armstrong

Armstrong, associate dean of clinical research and associate professor of dermatology, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, and colleagues studied claims data on 8,871,114 patients obtained from IMS Health, to determine treatment dynamics over a 5-year period from Oct. 1, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2012. There were 923,073 patients aged at least 18 years diagnosed with psoriasis, with continuous data available for 141,502 patients. There were data from 46,369 patients selected post-filtering, using a U.S. National Health and Wellness Survey from Kantar Health. Data were projected to reflect the total insured U.S. population.

Treatment categories included biologic, traditional systemic, phototherapy, lapsed, and naive (no psoriasis treatment during the 5-year study period). When a patient’s medication was changed, a “patient flow” was recorded.

There were approximately 1.7 million insured patients with moderate-to-severe psoriasis during the 5-year period, based on data projection, and 547,000 (32.2%) were classified as treatment-naive. There were 346,000 (20.4%) patients projected to be receiving treatment and 807,000 (47.5%) having lapsed in treatment in September 2012.

“The patient-flow model (representing patients in the year preceding September 2012) demonstrated that 65,000 treatment-naive patients started treatment; more treatment-naive patients initiated with topical treatment or phototherapy (48,000) than with systemic or biologic therapies (17,000),” the researchers wrote.

There were 449,000 patients stopping treatment and 87,000 patients switching treatment in the year preceding September 2012, with 392,000 (48.6%) of lapsed patients restarting treatments.

“Reasons for frequent treatment changes and lapses should be explored,” the researchers concluded. – by Bruce Thiel

Reference:

Mamolo C, et al. FC11-01. Initiation, Switching and Cessation of Psoriasis Treatments among Patients with Moderate to Severe Psoriasis in the United States: Results from a Retrospective Cohort Study. Presented at: 23rd World Congress of Dermatology; June 8-13, 2015; Vancouver, British Columbia.

Disclosure: Armstrong reports serving as an investigator and/or consultant to AbbVie, Amgen, Celgene, Janssen, Merck, Lilly, Novartis, and Pfizer. Healio.com/Dermatology was unable to confirm relevant financial disclosures of the other researchers at the time of publication.