Frederick van Someren, Milan Wiedemann, Charlotte Warren-Gash, Martina Sykorova, Hema Mistry, Michelle A Miller, Guy Leschziner, Ellen Nolte, Aurélien Belot, Ian E Smith, Tim Quinnell, Sofia H Eriksson, Helen Strongman
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Clinicians and people with narcolepsy report varied access to higher-cost narcolepsy treatments in England associated with variations in national and local commissioning. There are no publicly available data quantifying use of these drugs to support policy decisions. We therefore aimed to describe national, regional and local prescribing trends for higher-cost narcolepsy drugs using new national databases. We used the English prescribing dataset and secondary care medicines data to quantify volumes of high-cost narcolepsy drugs issued between 01 January 2019 and 31 December 2022. Volumes were converted to World Health Organisation defined daily doses, to estimate the monthly number of defined daily doses of sodium oxybate, pitolisant and solriamfetol issued by each integrated care board and region. We compared national, integrated care board, and regional level issuance of each drug over time. Analysis of almost 6000 primary care prescriptions and 2000 cumulative months of secondary care pharmacy stock data, issued across 41/42 integrated care boards in England, revealed a 49.1% increase in issuance of high-cost narcolepsy drugs between 2019 and 2022. In 2022, sodium oxybate accounted for 52.66% of issuance, pitolisant 43.09% and solriamfetol 4.25%, with 22.31% of defined daily doses issued in primary care. Three integrated care boards (NHS Southeast London, NHS Cumbria and North-East, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside) predominate, issuing 56.33% of all defined daily doses. Variations between integrated care boards and regions differ substantially by drug and route of issuance. Our findings describe substantial variation in the use of specialist narcolepsy drugs in England, and highlight the untapped potential of using large, public domain datasets to publicly review higher-cost drug prescribing.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Sleep Research is dedicated to basic and clinical sleep research. The Journal publishes original research papers and invited reviews in all areas of sleep research (including biological rhythms). The Journal aims to promote the exchange of ideas between basic and clinical sleep researchers coming from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines. The Journal will achieve this by publishing papers which use multidisciplinary and novel approaches to answer important questions about sleep, as well as its disorders and the treatment thereof.