Deucravacitinib improves quality of life of patients with moderate, severe psoriasis

Key takeaways:

• The proportion of deucravacitinib-treated patients that reported no quality-of-life impact increased from 0% at baseline to 33.3% at week 16.
• Only 17.5% reported a very large impact by week 16.

Deucravacitinib significantly improved skin-related quality of life of patients with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, according to a poster presented at Maui Derm Hawaii 2025.

A total of 40.6% to 43.3% of patients with psoriasis report a moderate to very large impact on their quality of life (QoL) with the impact increasing as disease severity intensified, according to data from the National Psoriasis Foundation. As many as 72.4% say the disease can impair their activity and 29.3% report an inability to participate in social experiences.

The ARTISTYK trial, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 4 study, found that deucravacitinib, an oral, tyrosine kinase 2 inhibitor, can alleviate QoL impairments in those with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis.

“This study highlights the negative impact of psoriasis on our patients’ quality of life but more importantly we learned that even patients with low [body surface area (BSA) involvement] are affected by their disease negatively,” Leon H. Kircik, MD, a steering committee member and investigator in the ARTISTYK trials, clinical professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Healio. “Deucravacitinib demonstrated consistent clinical efficacy and improvement of quality of life in these patients measures as well as safety.”

In the study, 180 adults with a more than 3% BSA involvement of psoriasis were randomly assigned to receive placebo (n = 60) or deucravacitinib (n = 120). Data showed a 70% rate of reported “very large or extremely large” disease impact among patients, constituting a DLQI score of 11 or greater.

After receiving 16 weeks of treatment, 33.3% of patients in the deucravacitinib arm reported experiencing zero effects of psoriasis on their QoL.

The proportion of patients that previously reported a very large effect on their QoL decreased significantly by week 16 (54.2% vs. 17.5%). Similarly, of the 15% of patients that stated psoriasis had an extremely large effect on their QoL, only 2.5% reported the same after 16 weeks of deucravacitinib treatment.

Patients receiving deucravacitinib rather than placebo were more likely to achieve better DLQI scores (OR = 3.1; 95% CI, 1.8-5.5). A higher proportion of deucravacitinib-treated patients also achieved clinically meaningful improvements in whole-body itch compared with placebo (51.8%; 95% CI, 42.1%-61.3% vs. 27.8%; 95% CI, 16.5%-41.6%).

Psoriasis Symptom and Sign Diary scores also drastically improved from baseline to week 16 among the deucravacitinib-treated vs. placebo group across multiple categories, including symptoms (–27.6; 95% CI, –31.6 to –23.6 vs. –10.8; 95% CI, –16.4, –5.2), signs (–29.1; 95% CI, –33.2 to –25.1 vs. –10.8; 95%CI, –16.5 to –5.1) and total disease presentations (–28.4; 95% CI, –32.3 to –24.4 vs. –10.8; 95% CI, –16.4 to –5.2; all P < .0001).

According to Kircik, these results also showed that QoL impacts from psoriasis are not contingent on disease severity and those with less severe disease require equal treatment consideration.

“I think it is important to remember that the impact on QoL is not dependent upon the disease severity and even mild disease may have negative effects on our patients and therefore appropriate treatment is important,” he told Healio.

Reference:

• Quality of life. https://www.psoriasis.org/quality-of-life/. Accessed Jan. 27, 2025.