Prescription-based prevalence of biological therapy in patients with psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel diseases.

The aim of this study was to determine the proportion of biological prescriptions over time. This study is based on data from IMS® Diagnosis Monitor and included patients who had received a biological drug in dermatology practices due to psoriasis (PSO), gastroenterology practices due to Crohn's disease (CD) or ulcerative colitis (UC), or rheumatology practices due to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) between April 2015 and December 2018. We analyzed 1,748,948 CD/UC-related prescriptions, 3,968,879 RA-related prescriptions, and 7,321,496 PSO-related prescriptions. Of these, 343,263 (19.6%) prescriptions for IBD, 92,343 (16.2%) prescriptions for RA, and 169,573 (6.9%) prescriptions for PSO were for biologicals. The proportion of biologicals has increased continuously over 4 years, namely from 16.3% to 21.3% (p < 0.01) for CD/UC treatment prescribed by gastroenterologists, from 12.4% to 16.0% (p < 0.01) for RA treatment prescribed by rheumatologists, and from 3.2% to 7.7% (p < 0.01) for PSO treatment prescribed by dermatologists. The proportions of biological therapies and their increase over time were age- and sex-dependent. In summary, we were able to show a significant increase in the proportion of biologicals used to treat CD/UC, RA, and PSO over the last four years.