The Role of Disease Severity and Gender in Polypharmacy Among Patients with NAFLD Enrolled in TARGET-NASH.

Challenge

The factors driving polypharmacy in NAFLD patients—particularly the interaction between disease severity, sex, and medication burden—had not been characterized at scale in a real-world population, creating a gap in the safety surveillance and drug development planning context for NAFLD therapeutics.

Solution

The TARGET-NASH registry was analyzed to describe medication use patterns by disease severity and sex, characterizing polypharmacy prevalence, mechanism-of-action categories, and the predictors of medication burden using descriptive statistics and comparative testing.

Impact

Characterizing that polypharmacy burden increases sharply with NAFLD severity—and that women with cirrhosis are particularly affected—provides drug developers with actionable concomitant medication context for NAFLD trial design and safety monitoring.