Appropriateness of immunosuppressive drugs in inflammatory bowel diseases assessed by RAND method: Italian Group for IBD (IG-IBD) position statement

Current use of immunosuppressive agents in inflammatory bowel disease patients in East China

“…Immunosuppressive agents such as AZA can induce and maintain remission of IBD and have steroid sparing effects in patients who are steroid dependent or who have refractory IBD [7,[18][19][20] . In our study, the use of immunosuppressive agents was restricted to a minority of IBD patients (19.6%) who adapted to use these drugs, which is distinctly less frequent compared with that in Western countries.…”

Appropriateness of Treatments for Patients With Degenerative Ataxias: Recommendations by a Panel of Experts

“…The rate of inappropriate recommendations in this study is high, confirming that whereas high quality scientific evidence are most often helpful in illuminating what clinicians should do in practice, expert opinion help to determine what they should not do and can delineate uncertain indications for which new trials are needed. Surprisingly the percentage of uncertain pairs, which could be interpreted as an expression of the lack of information and/or clinical experience, is not higher than the observed results published for other consensus panels on chronic and frequent diseases or common procedures [12,15,16]. In our case, since there was no disagreement among the panelists, these uncertain indications are due to median scores in the 4 -6 range.…”

Certolizumab pegol: an evidence-based review of its place in the treatment of Crohn’s disease

“…The thiopurines azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine are effective maintenance agents, including in steroid-dependent patients (Caprilli et al 2005a), with 42% of patients treated with azathioprine achieving remission at 15 months after induction with glucocorticoids compared with only 7% in the placebo group (Candy et al 1995). However, these drugs act slowly (Present et al 1980) and they are limited by potentially important adverse events, with 10-20% of patients being intolerant of them.…”