Patient-reported outcomes provide good long-term measurement of adalimumab treatment

Patient-reported outcomes provided long-term retest reliability for patients with rheumatoid arthritis who were treated with adalimumab, according to recently published data.

“Our data supply additional support for the relevance of statistically determined individual improvement criteria in clinical practice and provide insights into appropriate patient management and typical outcomes during adalimumab therapy that may be useful in managing treatment expectations,” the researchers wrote.

Researchers analyzed data from a discovery cohort of 700 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who were observed for between April 2004 and February 2014. The patients were under stable therapy for 12 months and 24 months. Random fluctuation was determined to be 3 points for pain, 4 points for fatigue, and 16 points for function.

The treatment cohort of 2,788 patients with RA during a 5-year, noninterventional study with a similar design demonstrated a decrease in DAS28 of 1.8 points or above in more than 53% of patients after 12 months of treatment with adalimumab (Humira, AbbVie), with 68.5% of those patients achieving improvements in pain compared with 40% of patients who improved in fatigue or function.

Significant improvements in all three patient-reported outcomes (PROs) occurred in 22.7% of patients. Overall, 22.8% of patients had no significant improvements in PROs. Of 1,305 patients who did not achieve a significant DAS28 response, 4.4% of patients reported improvements in PROs at month 12. Improvements in pain were most highly associated with PROs while fatigue had the lowest association. – by Shirley Pulawski

Disclosure: The researchers report AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG (formerly Abbott GmbH & Co. KG) provided funding for this study, data analysis and medical writing services.

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Source:

Scharbatke EC, et al. Arth Care Res. 2016;doi:10.1002/acr.22884.