Failure rates and survival times of systemic and biologic therapies in treating psoriasis: a retrospective study.

Background: Systemic and biologic therapies have varying failure rates and survival times in treating psoriasis.

Objective: We aim to describe the patterns of therapy failure in psoriasis patients.

Methods: A retrospective (January 2009 to May 2018) analysis of 250 psoriasis patients seen at a psoriasis referral center, and 806 treatment courses of several systemic and biologic therapies, was conducted to determine failure rates and survival times for systemic and biologic therapies.

Results: Systemic therapies failed more often due to their adverse effects (16.4% vs 7.2%,  < .001). Biologics failed more often due to secondary failure (24.2% vs. 9.3%,  < .001). Biologics had a longer survival time (23.9 ± 22.2 vs. 12.6 ± 15.4 months,  < .001), even with early failures (≤6 months) removed (29.0 ± 22.5 vs. 21.1 ± 16.4 months,  = .014).

Limitations: Tertiary referral center, unreported causes of failure, sample size.

Conclusions: Systemic therapies fail more often due to adverse effects while biologics fail more often due to loss of efficacy. Biologic therapies have longer survival times than systemic therapies.