COPENHAGEN – Children and adolescents with moderate to severe psoriasis are generally undertreated, with resultant potential psychological impairment, social stigmatization, and isolation, psoriasis experts agreed at the annual congress of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology.

In a session featuring new long-term safety and efficacy data from extended pediatric clinical trials of etanercept and adalimumab, prominent clinical trial investigators who presented the findings asserted that many physicians and parents are overly timid about the use of systemic treatment options in children and adolescents when such therapy is clearly warranted.

Many physicians and parents are overly timid about the use of systemic treatment options in children and adolescents when such therapy is clearly warranted.

“The burden of psoriasis is particularly acute in the pediatric population. I always ask patients, ‘How is psoriasis affecting you?’ And with children, it’s affecting them and it’s also affecting their parents. If it’s affecting their self-esteem – if it’s ruining your life and you can’t control it with topical agents – I think it’s time to think of other things,” declared Dr. Richard G. Langley, professor of dermatology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Yet all too often that doesn’t happen, as documented in the recently reported physician portion of the Multinational Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (MAPP) survey, which included 391 dermatologists and 390 rheumatologists in North America and Western Europe (J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol. 2015 Oct;29[10]:2002-10).

Dr. Langley was a coinvestigator in MAPP, which found that 39% of dermatologists reported treating their moderate to severe psoriasis patients with conventional oral and/or biologic agents (19.5% and 19.6%, respectively). A total of 75% indicated they prescribe topical medications as monotherapy for their patients with moderate to severe psoriasis. In children, that rate was even higher, he said, despite the fact that topical monotherapy is clearly inadequate for treatment of more severe disease.

“I think there’s a fear about using systemics among parents and among some practitioners, which was one of the top reasons in the MAPP survey that people didn’t get appropriate treatment,” he said.

That’s a shortsighted attitude, the dermatologist continued: “The risk is not just the risk of the drug, but the risk of untreated disease, because untreated disease devastates patients.”

MAPP was the largest-ever survey of physician and patient perspectives regarding psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The patient perspective, derived from interviews with nearly 3,500 patients, was published earlier (J Am Acad Dermatol. 2014 May;70[5]:871-81).

One impediment to more widespread use of systemic therapies for pediatric psoriasis is that it’s almost entirely off-label prescribing. In the United States, no conventional oral agents or biologics are Food and Drug Administration approved for use in psoriasis patients under age 18 years. That was the case in Europe as well until earlier this year, when adalimumab (Humira) received European marketing approval for children ages 4 years and up with severe chronic plaque psoriasis with an inadequate response to topical agents and phototherapy or in whom such therapies are contraindicated.

Dr. Kim A. Papp, who presented new 52-week safety and efficacy data from a phase III study of adalimumab in pediatric psoriasis patients, said that even when dermatologists utilize biologics in pediatric patients, the medications are typically underdosed. In the phase III pediatric adalimumab trial, for example, most participants were overweight or obese, and efficacy dropped off with increasing body mass index, as has been the case in trials of most of the biologics.

“When I look at the doses of the biologic agents that are used in treating the pediatric population and what we know about how these molecules are distributed in the body, we can safely say we are grossly underdosing children. We’re doing that because we believe somehow they’re at greater risk from exposures that are comparable to those in the adult population. And it’s not true. What we’ve seen over 20 years of using the biologics is that these agents are very safe and very effective when used appropriately in adequate doses,” according to Dr. Papp, president of Probity Medical Research in Waterloo, Ont.

Asked which biologics he’s most comfortable with in prescribing for pediatric patients, Dr. Papp replied, “I think the best biologic therapies for pediatric patients are the ones that have been studied in the pediatric population: etanercept, ustekinumab, and adalimumab. Those three are the ones we want to choose because we at least have some guidance and some assurance in terms of expectations of response and adverse events.”

Dr. Papp and Dr. Langley have served as principal investigators of numerous clinical trials for and served as advisors to pharmaceutical companies developing dermatologic medications.

bjancin@frontlinemedcom.com

EADV: Pediatric psoriasis called ‘grossly undertreated’