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Table 1 Definition of patient outcomes and reasons

From: Treatment patterns in rheumatoid arthritis patients newly initiated on biologic and conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug therapy and enrolled in a North American clinical registry

Patient outcome

Definition

Persistence

Continuous use of index therapy without a treatment gap of ≥ 30 days over a 12- or 24-month follow-up period. For patients who initiated combination therapy, this could have been a treatment gap with either therapy.

Discontinuation

A gap in therapy of ≥ 30 days without another prescription for the index therapy within that period.

Switch

Initiation of a therapy—biologic or csDMARD—other than the index therapy after discontinuation of the index therapy. While patients could have more than one switch event, the outcome was defined as the proportion of patients with any switching event during the follow-up period

Restart

Discontinuing therapy for ≥ 30 days, and restarting the same therapy after the discontinuation gap

Reasons

Side effect

Includes serious, minor, or fear of side effects

Social

Includes cost, preference, frequency of administration

Lack of effect

Includes inadequate response and failure to maintain initial response

Doing well

Includes remissions and similar events

Othera

Inclusive of all other reasons that cannot be categorized elsewhere

  1. aIncluding therapy no longer needed, formulary restriction, patient preference, physician preference, peer suggestion, fear future side effect, patient doing well, and frequency of administration, temporary interruption, to improve compliance, to improve tolerability, route of administration
  2. csDMARD, conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug