OBJECTIVES:

Targeted therapies for mCRC treatment have been available in Europe for several years now. We used long-term real-world data to study the influence of targeted therapies on the occurrence of side effects and analyzed country specific differences in treatments and influencing factors.

METHODS:

Treatment data of 10,231 mCRC patients collected between 2011 until 2016 in EU5 countries were extracted from the IMS^® Oncology Analyzer (OA) database. OA contains anonymous retrospectively collected patient level data on disease and treatment history provided by hospital- and office-based physicians. A count GEE regression model was used to evaluate differences in the number of side effects between treatments with and without targeted therapies. An ordinal GEE regression model was used to examine if the choice of therapy had been affected by factors such as country, year, age, sex or type of insurance.

RESULTS:

In the count GEE regression model patients receiving targeted therapies in combination with chemotherapy had a 0.15 fold increase in the predicted number of side effects compared to patients treated with chemotherapy only.

Initially, patients in UK and Spain were less likely to receive targeted therapies than in Germany. Over time, chances to receive targeted therapies increased significantly (P<0.05) in Spain (+25%), France (+13%) and Italy (+13%), but not in Germany (-3%) or UK (-4%). Health insurance type (public versus private) did not affect the likelihood of receiving targeted therapy.

CONCLUSIONS:

Use of targeted therapies increased the number of side effects only to a minor extent in mCRC patients. Over time, the percentage of targeted therapies converged to similar levels in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but remained lower in UK compared to the other countries. Real world data provide valuable up to date insights into clinically applied therapies, correlating factors of interest and allow further optimization of treatments.