Sustained response after discontinuation of short-and medium-term treatment with eltrombopag in patients with immune thrombocytopenia

Abstract

Eltrombopag is effective and safe in chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) patients not responding to previous therapy. However, when eltrombopag is discontinued, platelet counts usually return to baseline within 2 weeks. Here, we describe the clinical characteristics of the, to the best of our knowledge, largest case series of patients with ITP, who presented sustained responses after discontinuing eltrombopag (n = 12). The median time from diagnosis to eltrombopag initiation was 24 months (range, 1–480). The median number of prior therapies was 5 (range, 1–7), and the median duration of eltrombopag treatment was 5 months (range, 1–13). Three patients received eltrombopag for only 1 month. The treatment was well-tolerated. The median (range) follow-up of this case series was of 7 months (6–20), during which all patients maintained a safe platelet count without the need for anti-ITP treatment. The communication of such cases may support the conduction of new studies to investigate which predictive factors could identify ITP patients with sustained responses after discontinuing eltrombopag without additional therapy. The need of long-term use of eltrombopag should be re-examined.

• Eltrombopag
• immune thrombocytopenia
• sustained response

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no competing financial interests. A.B, J.R.G.P and T.J.G.L. conceived the study; J.R.G.P. performed the statistical analysis and wrote the paper; T.J.G.L, J.R.G.P., M.A, E.C., B.S.G., A.A., M.M., R.J.B. and M.C. included the patients, collected the data, performed a critical revision of the paper and approved the final version of the paper.