Registries Established for Patients With Psoriasis, Atopic Dermatitis, and COVID-19
New registries have been established to capture emerging data on patients with psoriasis and atopic dermatitis who have COVID-19.
Two new global initiatives for the collection of observational data including coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outcomes in patients with psoriasis and atopic dermatitis have been created. The web-based registries — PsoPROTECT (Psoriasis Patient Registry for Outcomes, Therapy and Epidemiology of Covid-19 infecTion) and SECURE-AD (Surveillance Epidemiology of Coronavirus Under Research Exclusion-Atopic Dermatitis) — provide a worldwide repository for clinician-reported COVID-19 outcomes reporting.
Patient demographics, comorbidities, change in psoriasis/atopic dermatitis severity, immunomodulator medications (including drug exposure prior to/during the illness), and COVID-19 symptoms, management, and outcome information is collected via short web-based PsoPROTECT and SECURE-AD case report forms that can be completed by clinicians for any cases of confirmed or suspected COVID-19. The data points collected online would be processed solely for the purpose of medical research undertaken in the public interest; no patient identifiers are collected and the data are housed on secure servers.
A key objective of the registries’ datasets is to identify predictors of COVID-19 outcomes in patients with psoriasis and atopic dermatitis and to “characterize patients in whom it may be beneficial to pause, continue or initiate systemic treatment.” Aggregated data will be published online via open-access summaries for the global clinical and patient community.
Researchers are also actively encouraged to apply to utilize the registry data, it was noted. The data generated from the registries, combined with emerging data in the literature, may influence clinical decision making during the pandemic.
Preliminary data should be interpreted with caution, the authors suggest, due to the potential for bias and incomplete data capture. Denominator data may also be lacking for each treatment. To guard against this, information from the PsoPROTECT and SECURE-AD registries can be considered in conjunction with existing large-scale pharmacovigilance registries. A patient-completed version of the forms reflecting the information collected from clinician reports will be available and may capture data from patients with milder dermatologic disease and COVID-10 infection not reported by their physicians.
Such “international collaboration between clinicians, scientists and patients in the current pandemic is essential to fulfil PsoPROTECT and SECURE-AD’s exciting potential to rapidly accrue large-scale datasets with high translational value,” the authors concluded. “The knowledge gained from these efforts will be vital for guiding treatment choices and counselling patients on how to mitigate the potential risk of COVID-19.”
Reference
Mahil SK, Yiu ZZN, Mason KJ, et al. Global reporting of cases of COVID-19 in psoriasis and atopic dermatitis: an opportunity to inform care during a pandemic (published online April 29, 2020). Br J Dermatol. doi:10.1111/bjd.19161
