Snelder SM, et al. – Purpose of conducting this work was to gauge 4–month omalizumab efficacy outcomes for severe allergic asthma. A good or excellent response of 65.5% to omalizumab after 16 weeks was indicated by this registry of 403 inadequately controlled severe allergic asthma patients in the Netherlands, in accordance with previous studies. Data obtained did not support the assumption that careful registration would lead to higher response rates. In order to measure response in omalizumab treated patients, improvement of asthma control questionnaire (ACQ) appeared to be a useful additional assessment tool.

Methods

• Study design was a “real world”, observational data registry.
• In this study, the outcomes of patients who received omalizumab between 2012 and 2015 were evaluated.
• Experts gathered data from all centers in the Netherlands comprising demographic features, criteria for starting treatment, global evaluation of treatment effectiveness (GETE), FEV1, oral corticosteroid use and ACQ.

Results

• In accordance with the treating physician GETE, 65.5% of the 403 patients had a good or excellent response to omalizumab after 16 weeks.
• All the criteria for prescribing omalizumab at baseline were met by 64.5%.
• It was noted that the mean ACQ improved from 2.96 at baseline to 1.83 at 16 weeks (p < 0.001).
• They observed more than 0.5 points improvement in the ACQ for 75.3% of the responders.
• From 71.58 to 79.06 (p < 0.001), the mean FEV1 increased.
• No relationship was noticed between patients with a FEV1 <80 and ≥80% at baseline and response (p = 0.981).
• A considerable improvement of FEV1 either/or ACQ or OCS use (88.3%) was recorded in most of the responders.
• On the other hand, results revealed improvement of either ACQ or FEV1 in 86.7% of the responders.
• In addition, 75.4% of the responders had an improvement of ACQ, while 50.4% had an improvement of FEV1.
• They suggested that 11.7% of the patients with no improvement of FEV1, ACQ or OCS use were considered to have a good response.