Better gastrointestinal tolerability with biologics than the conventional therapy

In Switzerland, consenting patients with moderate-to-severe psoriasis enter the SDNTT (Swiss Dermatology Network for Targeted Therapies) Psoriasis Registry when they start systemic treatment. The purpose of adding the outpatient data to the non-interventional registry lies in obtaining long-term evidence for the efficacy and safety of these therapies in psoriasis and comparing adverse and serious adverse events between biological and non-biological drugs.

In the evaluation presented, 473 patients were included until December 2016: this corresponds to 264 patient years of biological and 272 years of non-biological systemic therapy [1]. Their mean age was 46.7 years, 65% were male and more than a third not only suffered from psoriasis but also from psoriatic arthritis.

Rates of serious adverse events and non-serious infection rates were not significantly different between the two treatment groups. The most reported non-serious adverse events were ineffectiveness of the drug with 15.8 % of patients treated with biologics and 16.6% in the non-biological group. Non-serious gastrointestinal side effects were significantly higher in the non-biological cohort compared to biological regimes (14.1 vs. 4.3/100 patient years; P≤0.05). All in all, serious adverse events were uncommon and without a different distribution among the two kinds of treatment.

1. Maul, JT. et al. P5975, AAD Annual Meeting, February 16–20 2018.



Posted on 21 December, 2018