Health-related quality of life in adult primary immune thrombocytopenia

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) and the associated biologic and psychological effects can lead to reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL).

Areas covered: This review focuses on the impact of ITP itself and its treatment on patients’ HRQoL. The findings show that the HRQoL is uniformly reduced amongst ITP patients, both with and without interventions. ITP significantly affects many aspects of patient HRQoL, which is comparable to that of patients with other chronic diseases. However, there is a lack of longitudinal studies among unselected ITP populations and the majority of studies focus on statistical differences between groups or between measures at different time points rather than quality of life (QoL) changes that are perceived as clinically relevant in patients.

Expert commentary: Due to ITP being a chronic disease with an ongoing risk of bleeding, many treatments, and a good prognosis for survival, patients deal with their symptoms over prolonged time periods and good HRQoL is very important. In this review of HRQoL in ITP, we provide data on the current understanding, how HRQoL may be modified by treatment, and why it needs to be included as an outcome in future studies to optimize management of HRQoL issues in clinical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• ITP
• fatigue
• SF-36
• ITP-PAQ
• autoimmunity

Declaration of interest

H. Frederiksen has received research funding from Alexion, Gilead, Abbvie, Janssen and Novartis during the past 2 years. J. B. Bussel has served on advisory boards for Novartis, Amgen, Rigel, UCB and Momenta, and received research funding in the past 2 years from Novartis, Amgen, Rigel and Protalex. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.