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Addendum to corticosteroid side effects and risk for bleeding in immune thrombocytopenic purpura: patient perspectives
Author(s) -
Guidry Jacqueline A.,
Watson Shirley,
George James N.,
Vesely Sara K.,
Terrell Deirdra R.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
european journal of haematology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1600-0609
pISSN - 0902-4441
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0609.2009.01322.x
Subject(s) - biostatistics , epidemiology , public health , medicine , watson , family medicine , gerontology , pathology , natural language processing , computer science
To the Editor: We recently published our data from surveys of patients in the Oklahoma immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) Registry and practicing haematologists in the state of Oklahoma which documented a significant difference between ITP patients’ and haematologists’ perspectives about the severity of side effects of corticosteroid treatment and their concern about the risk for serious bleeding (1). In this publication, we listed multiple potential limitations of our study, principally whether our ITP patients were representative of all ITP patients and therefore whether their responses were generalizable. We were also concerned about the accuracy of the patients’ responses, which may have been biased by their recall of past experience, and the heterogeneity of the patient group, which included some patients who’s ITP had resolved, some who’s ITP remained symptomatic, and some who had persistent thrombocytopenia without symptoms. We recently had the opportunity to validate our results with a different patient group, patients who attended the Annual Convention of the ITP Support Association in Edinburgh, Scotland on 16 May 2009. Patients attending the Convention, described here as UK patients, were given the same questionnaire as patient participants in Oklahoma, described as US patients. The results are presented in the Table 1. There was no significant difference between the patient groups regarding their lowest platelet count or the duration they were treated with corticosteroids. In both groups, 80% of patients reported that their lowest platelet count had been less than 10 000 ⁄ lL and approximately one-third of the patients had received corticosteroid treatment for longer than 12 months. The questionnaire asked patients how bothered they were by 18 different side effects of corticosteroid treatment. They graded each side effect according to a four choice scale: ‘bothered a lot’, ‘bothered