IMPE Abstracts

Background: Recombinant human growth hormone (r-hGH) therapy is an effective treatment for children with growth disorders. However, poor adherence to treatment may lead to suboptimal growth and other outcomes. The easypod™ connected injection device records and transmits data on dose and injection settings from patients receiving r-hGH, enabling HCPs to monitor individual patients’ adherence to treatment.

Aim: To evaluate and compare real-world adherence to r-hGH treatment administered via easypod™ among patients from six Latin American countries, to provide an update to recently published exploratory descriptive analyses.¹

Patients and Methods: Latin American countries with at least 100 patients with available adherence data between January 2019 and December 2021 extracted from the easypod™ connect ecosystem were selected for analysis (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru). Adherence was categorized, based on milligrams of r-hGH injected vs milligrams of r-hGH prescribed, as high (≥85%), intermediate (>56%–<85%), or low (≤56%). Transmission frequency was categorized as high (≥4 per year) or low (<4 per year). Chi-square tests were applied to study the effect of sex, age <10 years at treatment start, and transmission frequency on adherence.

Results: In total, data for 4,008 patients were available (male; n=2309), with mean age at treatment start ranging from 9.6–10.4 years. Overall, 61.9% (n=2, 482), 28.1% (n=1, 128), and 9.9% (n=398) of patients had high, intermediate, and low adherence, respectively. The proportion of high adherence in the first year ranged between 61.3–82.0% across the six countries, while this was 53.6–74.7% in the second year, and 46.1–67.8% after the third year. Sex and age at treatment start had a significant effect on the proportion of patients with high adherence: 64.4% of girls vs 60.1% of boys (P=0.005); with high adherence reported in 63.8% vs 60.4% of patients who started their treatment at <10 years of age vs ≥10 years of age, respectively (P=0.03). Significant differences were found in the proportion of patients with high data transmission frequency between high (1,014/2,276, 44.6%), intermediate (348/1,065, 32.7%), and low (62/373, 16.6%) adherence groups (P<0.001).

Conclusion: The data extracted from the easypod™ connect ecosystem showed that a substantial proportion of patients from six Latin American countries had high adherence to r-hGH treatment between 2019 and 2021. These results further validate the importance of a connected injected device to administer r-hGH treatment in patients with growth disorders.

Reference: 1. Assefi A, et al. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2022;10(1):e32626.