Abatacept switching from IV to SC and back at the 2017 EULAR Annual Meeting in Madrid

I had already looked at abatacept at the 2017 EULAR Annual Meeting in Madrid [1,2]. Now I have found another issue concerning abatacept. It is about r the ACTION (AbataCepTIn rOutiNe clinical practice) study, which is an observational study, which our employer doesn’t allow us to participate. Let’s have a closer look at the study.

R. Alten and colleagues presented [3]: „ LESS THAN 5% OF REAL-LIFE PATIENTS WHO SWITCH FROM IV TO SC ABATACEPT IN REAL-WORLD CLINICAL PRACTICE SUBSEQUENTLY SWITCH BACK TO THE IV FORMULATION”. Conclusions: “Less than 5% of pts who switched formulation from IV to SC abatacept in real-world clinical practice re-switched to the IV formulation, suggesting that switching has no adverse clinical impact. A change in formulation was mainly due to pt wish, reflecting their involvement in decision-making.”

That is strange indeed. The data reflects real world and not study reality. But I have made the opposite observation. When SC formulation became available, we switched patients from IV to SC and only a few stayed on SC – the very few ones with problematic veins, who suffered multiple IV punctures each time. Another observation at our center: patients, who started SC hardly ever switched to IV. There’s quite a lot of room for interpretation. Maybe patients in an observational study still reflect more a study cohort than real world patients.

Links and References:

[1] http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2017/06/blog-eular-2017-abatacept-biosimilars.html

[2] http://rheumatologe.blogspot.de/2017/06/risk-of-opportunistic-infections-in.html

[3] DOI: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2017-eular.1379

.