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  • Title: Concomitant asthma medication use by patients receiving omalizumab 2003-2008.
    Author: Broder MS, Zazzali JL, Chang E, Yegin A.
    Journal: J Asthma; 2011 Dec; 48(10):1058-62. PubMed ID: 22091742.
    Abstract:
    OBJECTIVE: To examine patterns of omalizumab use in the first 5 years of its availability. METHODS: Our study comprised a series of descriptive retrospective cohort analyses using healthcare claims data. The study population comprised patients of any age who had omalizumab claims in the 5 years after 1 July 2003, and we created five 1-year cohorts from this population. Each cohort included patients continuously enrolled for at least 12 months with ≥2 omalizumab claims during the year. Cohorts contained between 302 and 1382 unique omalizumab users, and over 99% of patients with an omalizumab claim had at least one asthma diagnosis. RESULTS: In all years, the specialty most commonly seen in conjunction with the initial omalizumab prescription was allergy/immunology. In all years, omalizumab was used in conjunction with three or more additional classes of asthma medications at least 70% of the time and with five or more classes at least 33% of the time; the proportion of patients filling omalizumab prescriptions who had no other concomitant classes of asthma medications varied from 4% to 8%. The most common pattern of asthma medication treatment in all years was omalizumab with combination steroids/long-acting beta-agonist inhaler, a leukotriene receptor antagonist, a short-acting beta-agonist inhaler, and at least one course of oral corticosteroids. CONCLUSIONS: In this study of a large sample of commercial health insurance claims covering the first 5 years after approval of omalizumab, we found that omalizumab was infrequently used as a single agent or without concomitant inhaled corticosteroids, and most omalizumab prescriptions came from specialist physicians.
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