Today, many guidelines are available that provide clinical recommendations on asthma or COPD care with as ultimate goal to improve outcomes of patients. There is a lack of knowledge how patients newly diagnosed with asthma or COPD are treated in real-world, especially with regard to treatment step-up and treatment step-down therapy. We aim to give insight in real-world treatment patterns of asthma and/or COPD patients to understand and address current gaps in care. Therefore, we hope to run this study in many databases across the network.
This study will describe the treatment pathways of patients newly diagnosed with asthma, COPD or ACO (i.e. Asthma COPD Overlap syndrome). The analysis will calculate the aggregate summary statistics for each diagnosis cohort to determine the treatment pathway for each of the respiratory drugs in the study (i.a. SABA, LABA, ICS, Systemic glucocorticoids (acute/therapy), LAMA, LTRA, Xanthines, Systemic B2 agonists, Anti IgE, Anti IL4, Anti IL5(R), PDE4, LABA-ICS, LABA-LAMA, LABA-LAMA-ICS, SABA-SAMA). For each of the cohorts, a sunburst diagram is produced to describe the proportion of the respiratory drugs for each treatment sequence observed in the target population. This analysis will provide information about the utilisation of all respiratory drugs as available in the contributing data source/s, allowing us to summarise the most prevalent first-line therapies utilised, the proportion of individuals that discontinue treatment, switch treatments or augment their therapy. All results can directly be explore in an interactive shiny application on site and will later be assembled on a shiny server.
The study package is available on GitHub: https://github.com/mi-erasmusmc/AsthmaCOPDTreatmentPatterns, together with a description of the installation steps and a link to the study protocol.
For more information about collaborating and questions please contact Aniek Markus (a.markus@erasmusmc.nl).
. Please let me know if you have any update from our last result. I’ll rerun.