Advantages of Proactive Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in a Prospective Cohort of Children With Inflammatory Bowel Disease Treated With Anti‐Tumour Necrosis Factor
Marco Gasparetto, Natasha Burgess, Sandhia Naik, Dominic Studart, Ahmed Kadir, Nick Croft, Ian Sanderson, Protima Deb
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Few studies have addressed whether proactive therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) results in improved clinical outcomes in children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treated with anti-tumour necrosis factor. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of using proactive TDM in this patient group.Pilot single-centre observational study to accrue data on patients managed with proactive TDM.More patients in the proactive TDM cohort were managed by escalating the infliximab (IFX) regime (P < 0.001). The need for switching to different biologics was significantly lower in this patient group (P < 0.001).The introduction of proactive TDM resulted in a significant reduction of patients requiring switch of their primary biologic. The results of this study are indicators that proactive TDM offers a better method of managing children with IBD on IFX therapy.