Prescriptions Drive Higher Costs for Moderate-to-Severe Pediatric Psoriasis

Health care resource use and costs increased with psoriasis severity in a real-world claims analysis of pediatric patients with psoriasis in the United States, according to study results published online ahead of print in Advances in Therapy.

The retrospective analysis tapped IBM MarketScan databases for the years 2016 through 2018 for data on patients younger than 18 who were newly diagnosed with psoriasis.

The average age at psoriasis diagnosis was 12.6 years, according to the study. Just over 13% of the patients were diagnosed with moderate-to-severe psoriasis. The most prevalent comorbidities observed in the study population were anxiety (6.6%), depression (4.1%), and obesity (3.9%).

For first-line treatment, 79.1% of patients with mild psoriasis and 52% of patients with moderate-to-severe psoriasis were prescribed topical treatments. Other first-line therapies prescribed to patients with moderate-to-severe psoriasis were nonbiologic systemics (21%), phototherapy (15%), and biologics (9.2%), analysis showed.

Average annual total all-cause costs per patient were $27,541 for patients with moderate-to-severe psoriasis and $5034 for those with mild psoriasis.

“Higher unadjusted health care costs by severity were driven by outpatient prescription costs,” researchers reported.

Reference:
Edson-Heredia E, Anderson S, Guo J, et al. Real-World Claims Analyses of Comorbidity Burden, Treatment Pattern, Healthcare Resource Utilization, and Costs in Pediatric Psoriasis. Adv Ther. 2021;38(7):3948-3961. doi:10.1007/s12325-021-01795-7