LOS ANGELES — After 6 months of treatment with tegaserod, patients with irritable bowel syndrome increased their work productivity by an average of more than 3 hours per week compared with those who did not take the drug.
Tegaserod users also showed a significant decrease in daily activity impairment compared with those who did not take the drug, Dr. Pierre Paré reported in a poster session at the annual Digestive Disease Week.
“We've known for a long time that the efficacy of this drug is demonstrated,” Dr. Paré, of the division of gastroenterology at St.-Sacrement Hospital, Quebec City, said in an interview. But this marks the first study of IBS patients in a usual care setting to show that tegaserod positively affects work productivity and daily activities.
He and his associates enrolled 1,372 patients with IBS symptoms from 147 medical practice sites across Canada. Most were family practice sites.
The researchers collected clinical and patient-reported outcomes at baseline and at months 1, 3, and 6. They used the Work Productivity and Activity Questionnaire (WPAI) for IBS to measure work activity. This questionnaire measures absenteeism, presenteeism, work productivity loss, and activity impairment resulting from IBS symptoms.
Dr. Paré reported that the mean age of the patients was 46 years, the mean length of disease duration was 12 years, and most of the patients (86%) were female.
Of the entire group, 360 patients were tegaserod users and 1,012 were not. At baseline, a similar portion of patients in each group was employed (61% of tegaserod users vs. 60% of nonusers).
By month 6, tegaserod users showed larger but nonsignificant improvements compared with nonusers on these aspects of the WPAI: absenteeism (3%), presenteeism (8%), and overall productivity impairment (8%). However, tegaserod users did show a significant improvement on the WPAI component of daily activity impairment (12%) compared with nonusers.
Using a 40-hour work week as an average, the researchers estimated that tegaserod users reduced productivity loss by an average of 3.3 hours per week compared with nonusers. In Canada, this translates into a societal savings of about $65 per tegaserod user per week, Dr. Paré said. In the United States, he estimated that the savings would be about $53 per tegaserod user per week.
A key limitation of the study, he added, was its nonrandomized design. Also, “we don't have data on outcome of clinical symptoms,” he said.
Year-long follow-up data on these patients should be available soon.
The study, which earned a “poster of distinction” designation from the meeting organizers, was funded by Novartis Pharma AG in Basel, Switzerland.