Dupilumab Effective for Severe Atopic Dermatitis at 5 Years: Daily Dose

Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On October 25, 2024, we reported on a study published in the Journal of Dermatological Treatment that assessed the 5-year drug survival of dupilumab in real-world patients with atopic dermatitis (AD).

The study

The retrospective study involved 709 patients (53.2% men; mean age, 33 years) with severe AD receiving dupilumab. Drug survival was analyzed using Kaplan-Meier survival curves to estimate the risk and time to discontinuation. The log-rank test and Cox regression analysis were applied to examine differences in drug survival across baseline clinical characteristic groups (ie, age, sex, AD onset pattern, atopic comorbidities).

The findings

Over 60 months of treatment, 38% of patients achieved complete remission after taking dupilumab, while 91% experienced at least a 90% improvement in their eczema scores. Additionally, 83% of patients reported either no itch or only mild itching.

The researchers also looked at factors that might predict why some patients stop treatment, finding people with a specific type of the condition, called nummular eczema, had a higher risk of developing psoriasis while on dupilumab, leading them to discontinue taking the medicine. This was the first research paper to report the correlation.

Authors' comment

"This investigation establishes dupilumab's enduring efficacy and safety in severe AD, emphasizing its potential as a sustained therapeutic option over 5+ years. Baseline characteristics did not seem to influence DS, with the exception of the nummular eczema-like phenotype, which emerged as a significant predictor of psoriasis occurrence."

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