AbbVie highlights treatment adherence
pharmafile | June 12, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | ALIGN, AbbVie, Abbott, Crohn’s disease, TNF, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, treatment, ulcerative colitis
Patients with inflammatory diseases tend to be better at following their treatment regimes with TNF inhibitors rather than other medicines, according to a new survey by AbbVie.
ALIGN’s purpose was to look at “patients’ beliefs, concerns, attitudes and adherence toward TNF inhibitors and selected conventional therapies” taken either alone or in combination to treat rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis or psoriasis.
It found that adherence to treatment, as determined by the short Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-4), was “generally higher in patients treated with TNF inhibitors with or without conventional therapy compared to patients treated with conventional therapy”.
In one sense the findings in this manufacturer-sponsored survey will not come as a surprise since AbbVie is wedded to this class of drugs.
Its own TNF blocker Humira is the manufacturer’s key financial driver at present, with nine indications in Europe and seven in the US and sales of $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2014 alone – although its US patent expires in December 2016.
However, pharma understands relatively little about how the way patients feel about a treatment – impacts on how well they adhere to it, so any clue to this could be valuable for health professionals as well as marketers and developers of drugs.
ALIGN also found that, overall, more patients who were not too worried about their medication (classed as ‘accepting’ patients) adhered to their treatment than did those who had a high concern about it (‘ambivalent’ patients).
These numbers, presented this week at the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) 2014 Congress in Paris, were based on validated measured such as MMAS-4 analysis and combined Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (BMQ) scores.
“Getting patients to adhere to medication continues to be a common healthcare problem, particularly among patients with chronic illnesses,” says John Weinman, study investigator and professor of psychology at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College, London.
“This study, across six chronic inflammatory diseases and 33 countries, is the first of its kind and provides the medical community with important insights into how patients’ beliefs and concerns may influence treatment adherence,” Weinman adds.
BMQ results, also found that patients treated with TNF inhibitors – with or without conventional therapy – had a higher perceived “necessity” for treatment of their disease, compared to patients taking other therapies.
Patients’ ratings of ‘concern’ around their treatments were similar across both groups.
“These findings are encouraging given TNF inhibitors’ role in the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases,” says Maria Rivas, vice president, global medical affairs at Abbvie. “However, there remains room for improving overall treatment adherence.”
Adam Hill
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