AT THE 2016 SID ANNUAL MEETING
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. (FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS) – Patients with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) may be misdiagnosed when they see providers who are not dermatologists – as is usually the case during the initial years of their disease, according to a large analysis of medical claims data.
The findings highlight the need for visual diagnostic aids and specific guidelines for treating HS that target nondermatologists, Melissa Butt, MPH, of Penn State Hershey (Pa.) Medical Center, said during an interview at the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. She presented the findings during a poster session at the meeting.
HS is a chronic inflammatory disease of the hair follicles that affects 0.5%-4% of people in the United States. In past studies, up to 12 years elapsed between disease onset and diagnosis, in part because patients often cannot readily access dermatologists, Ms. Butt said. To better understand patterns of health care use during the years leading up to HS diagnosis, she and her colleagues used MarketScan data to identify 1,733 patients with HS-specific medical care claims filed in 2012 and 2013. Then they looked back at medical claims for these patients during 2008 through 2011, before the patients were diagnosed with HS. The cohort averaged 37 years of age (standard deviation, 15 years), and 73% were female.
Among 239,892 claims filed before patients were diagnosed with HS, 11,381 (4.7%) included codes for other diseases of the skin and subcutaneous tissues, Ms. Butt said. Dermatologists filed only 31% of these skin-specific claims, while 69% were filed by other providers, such as family practitioners, internists, emergency department physicians, and acute care hospitalists.
Notably, about two-thirds of the skin-specific diagnostic codes could have represented a misdiagnosis of HS. These codes included conditions such as abscesses, carbuncles, local infections, ulcers, and diseases of the sebaceous glands.
The fact that 78% of visits occurred in offices and other outpatient settings further underscores the need to improve the detection and care of HS in these environments, Ms. Butt said. Given current national shortages of dermatologists, visual HS diagnostic aids and “detailed, multistep clinical practice guidelines” for nondermatologists could help improve care of HS while patients wait to see the specialists, she added.
A second poster presented at the meeting provided results of a study on the use and impact of antibiotics in the treatment of HS. Alexander Fischer of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and his associates studied antibiotic prescriptions and bacterial cultures from the lesions of 239 patients with HS who were treated at Johns Hopkins medical facilities between 2010 and 2015. Not only were 51% of HS patients on antibiotics at the time of culture, but these patients’ lesions were significantly more likely to contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria than were those of patients not on antibiotics.
Strikingly, Proteus species were isolated from nearly half of patients on trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP/SMX), and 88% of colonies were resistant to TMP/SMX, while only 13% of cultures from untreated patients grew Proteus (P less than .001) and all were TMP/SMX-susceptible (P less than .001). Likewise, 100% of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains from patients prescribed ciprofloxacin were resistant to it, compared with a 10% background rate of ciprofloxacin resistance among MRSA from patients not taking antibiotics (P = .04). In addition, the proportion of other S. aureus strains that were clindamycin-resistant was higher when patients were taking this antibiotic than when they were not (63% versus 17%; P = .03).
The results “raise questions” about whether antibiotics should be used in HS patients who are not clearly benefiting from them, according to the researchers.
The authors of both studies reported no funding sources and had no disclosures.
