Citations

Objectives: Despite substantial evidence supporting the efficacy of stimulant medication for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), adherence to stimulant treatment is often suboptimal. Applying social/cognitive theories to understanding and assessing parent attitudes toward initiating medication may provide insight into factors influencing parent decisions to follow ADHD treatment recommendations. This report describes results from formative research that used focus groups to obtain parent input to guide development of a provider-delivered intervention to improve adherence to stimulants. Methods: Participants were caregivers of children with ADHD who were given a stimulant treatment recommendation. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed by inductive, grounded theory methods as well as a deductive analytic strategy using an adapted version of the Unified Theory of Behavior Change to organize and understand parent accounts. Results: Five groups were conducted with 27 parents (mean child age=9.35 years; standard deviation [SD]=2.00), mean time since diagnosis=3.33 years (SD=2.47). Most parents (81.5%) had pursued stimulant treatment. Inductive analysis revealed 17 attitudes facilitating adherence and 25 barriers. Facilitators included parent beliefs that medication treatment resulted in multiple functional gains and that treatment was imperative for their children's safety. Barriers included fears of personality changes and medication side effects. Complex patterns of parent adherence to medication regimens were also identified, as well as preferences for psychiatrists who were diagnostically expert, gave psychoeducation using multiple modalities, and used a chronic illness metaphor to explain ADHD. Theory-based analyses revealed conflicting expectancies about treatment risks and benefits, significant family pressures to avoid medication, guilt and concern that their children required medication, and distorted ideas about treatment risks. Parents, however, took pride in successfully pursuing efforts to manage their child behaviorally and to avoid medication when possible. Conclusions: Focus group data identified social, cognitive, and affective influences on treatment decision making. Results support prior research comparing family/social functioning, physician characteristics, and adherence. Findings suggest that parent attitudes to psychiatric care need to be assessed comprehensively at initial evaluation to aid the development of psychoeducational messages, and a more careful consideration about how parents interpret and respond to adherence-related questioning.

SummaryStudies of ethnic disparities in malignancies have revealed variation in clinical outcomes. In multiple myeloma (MM), previous literature has focused only on patients of Caucasian and African‐American (AA) descent. We present a Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER)‐based outcome analysis of MM patients from a broader range of ethnicities, representing current United States demographics. The SEER 17 Registry data was utilized to analyse adult MM patients diagnosed since 1992 (n = 37 963), as patients of other ethnicities were not well represented prior to that. Overall survival (OS) and myeloma‐specific survival (MSS) were compared across different ethnicities stratified by year of diagnosis, registry identification, age, sex and marital‐status. Hispanics had the youngest median age at diagnosis (65 years) and Whites had the oldest (71 years) (P < 0·001). Increased age at diagnosis was an independent predictor of decreased OS and MSS. Asians had the best median OS (2·7 years) and MSS (4·1 years), while Hispanics had the worst median OS (2·4 years). These trends were more pronounced in patients ≥75 years. Cumulative survival benefit over successive years was largest among Whites (1·3 years) and smallest among Asians (0·5 years). These disparities may be secondary to multifactorial causes that need to be explored and should be considered for optimal triaging of healthcare resources.

Summary The importance of serum immunoglobulin (Ig)G concentration in IgG replacement therapy for primary immunodeficiency diseases is established in certain settings. Generally, IgG is infused via the intravenous (IVIG) or subcutaneous (SCIG) route. For IVIG infusion, published data demonstrate that higher IgG doses and trough levels provide patients with improved protection from infection. The same conclusions are not yet accepted for SCIG; data from two recent Phase III studies and a recent post-hoc analysis, however, suggest the same correlation between higher SCIG dose and serum IgG concentration and decreased incidence of infection seen with IVIG. Other measures of clinical efficacy have not been considered similarly. Thus, combined analyses of these and other published SCIG studies were performed; a full comparison of the 13 studies was, however, limited by non-standardized definitions and reporting. Despite these limitations, our analyses indicate that certain clinical outcomes improve at higher SCIG doses and associated higher serum IgG concentrations, and suggest that there might be opportunity to improve patient outcomes via SCIG dose adjustment.