Abstract
Purpose :
Medications can result in side effects which may lead to medication non-adherence and, eventually, to poor outcomes. This study aimed to quantify to what extent the side effects of dry eye disease (DED) medications (burning/stinging sensation and blurring) are important to patients as opposed to medication benefits or costs.
Methods :
Patients who were diagnosed with DED were recruited at a referral eye centre in Singapore (n=139). This study utilized a Discrete Choice Experiment where patients were presented with 10 choice tasks where they were asked to choose between their current medication (or no medication), and two hypothetical medications that varied based on five attributes: duration of burning/stinging, duration of blurring, time to medication effectiveness, medication frequency, and out-of-pocket cost. The main outcomes were relative attribute importance and predicted uptake.
Results :
Latent class logistic regressions found two groups with distinct preferences. Classes 1 and 2 constituted 62.5% and 37.5% of the sample. For both classes, duration of burning/stinging (Class1=12%, Class2=20%) and cost (Class1=12%, Class2=19%) were the most important attributes while duration of blurring (Class1=8%, Class2=6%) was the least important. The predicted uptake of a medication increased 18 percentage-points when burning/stinging duration decreased from 2 hours to a few minutes. The increase was 41 percentage-points for Class 2 who were more likely to report neutral/poor control of their dry eye symptoms.
Conclusions :
This study showed that side effects should be considered, in parallel with therapeutic efficacy, when choosing anti-inflammatory medications in DED. Incorporating patient preferences in treatment decisions could potentially improve patient acceptance of a treatment regimen.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.