Singapore, Jun 24, 2009: Decision Resources, a research and advisory firm focusing on pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, says that AstraZeneca Seroquel's first-line patient share grew two percent since last year's patient-level claims data analysis of prescribing trends in bipolar disorder.

 

During the same time period other atypicals (with the exception of Pfizer's Geodon) lost first-line patient share which suggests that Seroquel's better penetration of first-line therapy came at the expense of others in the atypical class such as Bristol-Myers Squibb/Otsuka's Abilify and Eli Lilly's Zyprexa.

 

Although surveyed psychiatrists rate the overall attributes of Abilify higher than Seroquel/Seroquel XR, surveyed primary care physicians' assessment of these two agents is the opposite. Despite the advantage that surveyed psychiatrists give to Abilify over Seroquel on side-effect and safety attributes, Abilify's patient share is second to that of Seroquel in both first- and second-line therapy.

 

The new report entitled Treatment Algorithms in Bipolar Disorder also finds that although risperidone is now available in generics there is no clear evidence of its expanded uptake in early lines of therapy. Approximately 15 percent of surveyed physicians do not prescribe generic risperidone first-line and only one-third of surveyed physicians estimate that they prescribe generic risperidone first-line to more than half of their bipolar patients.

 

By pairing patient-level claims data with primary survey data, this report can be used to build patient-flow models and analyze the assumptions driving these models.

 

"Our analysis of patient-flow to Seroquel XR shows that 30 percent of the patients who take it after another agent previously received Seroquel, indicating that Seroquel XR continues to garner a major portion of its business in patients using it as a replacement for Seroquel. However, approximately one-third of surveyed physicians plan to use Seroquel XR more often in the first-line over the next two years, which suggests that competitors will need to position themselves to combat Seroquel XR's growing use as a first-line treatment," said Dr Madhuri Borde, product director of Treatment Algorithms at Decision Resources.