Persistent Inadequate Disease Control and Therapeutic Inertia in Moderate-to-Severe Atopic Dermatitis: A 12-month Longitudinal Analysis of Real-world Outcomes from the TARGET-DERM AD registry.
Persistent Inadequate Disease Control and Therapeutic Inertia in Moderate-to-Severe Atopic Dermatitis: A 12-month Longitudinal Analysis of Real-world Outcomes from the TARGET-DERM AD registry (Fall Clinical 2024)
Challenge
A significant proportion of moderate-to-severe AD patients receiving systemic therapy continue to have inadequate disease control over 12 months, but the real-world magnitude of therapeutic inertia—defined as failure to escalate despite unmet treat-to-target goals—had not been quantified using the AHEAD framework in a large US/Canadian registry.
Solution
The TARGET-DERM AD registry was used to identify patients initiating their first systemic therapy with moderate-to-severe AD (vIGA-AD 3/4) and track the proportion who failed to achieve AHEAD moderate or optimal targets at 3–12 months without treatment escalation.
Impact
Documenting that a large proportion of patients remain inadequately controlled without treatment escalation provides the real-world evidence base for prescriber education initiatives and supports the regulatory and commercial case for therapies that reliably achieve ambitious treat-to-target thresholds in moderate-to-severe AD.
