Background: Although it is a truism that drugs benefit patients only when taken, surprisingly little is known about real-world drug-use persistence and discontinuation, even for expensive biologic drugs.
Methods: We used longitudinal self-reported drug-use data from the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) Partners registry of people with IBD to construct Kaplan-Meier drug-use persistency graphs for biologic drug-use spans that started between 2017 and 2022.
Results: We examined 2034 drug-use spans for 1594 survey participants. Most of the biologic drugs had a 75%+ persistency rate around the one-year mark and 60%+ persistency at the 3-year mark. The overall persistency and the differences in persistency between drugs were aligned with published literature.
Conclusions: This analysis demonstrates the feasibility of collecting IBD-specific patient-reported drug persistency data via a voluntary patient registry. Patient-reported persistency provides real-world drug persistency data and the patient's perspectives as to why they discontinued use of the drug-a combination of data and perspective that is not available from any other real-world medical record, claim, and pharmacy data source that are valuable to physician, patients, payers, healthcare policymakers, and health technology assessment organizations.
Keywords: Crohn’s disease; biologic drugs; drug discontinuation; drug persistence; inflammatory bowel disease; patient registry; ulcerative colitis.
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Crohn's & Colitis Foundation.