Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Pharmacol Ther. Feb 6, 2018; 9(1): 8-13
Published online Feb 6, 2018. doi: 10.4292/wjgpt.v9.i1.8
Declining use of combination infliximab and immunomodulator for inflammatory bowel disease in the community setting
Joshua C Berkowitz, Joanna Stein-Fishbein, Sundas Khan, Richard Furie, Keith S Sultan
Joshua C Berkowitz, Sundas Khan, Department of Medicine, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Manhasset, NY 11030, United States
Joanna Stein-Fishbein, Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Manhasset, NY 11030, United States
Richard Furie, Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Manhasset, NY 11030, United States
Keith S Sultan, Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Manhasset, NY 11030, United States
Author contributions: Berkowitz JC and Sultan KS designed the study, gathered, analyzed the data and composed the manuscript; Stein-Fishbein J contributed to data analysis and manuscript drafting; Khan S and Furie R contributed to data collection and to the drafting of the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: This study was approved by the Northwell Health Institutional Review Board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Keith S Sultan, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, 300 Community Dr., Manhasset, NY 11030, United States. ksultan@northwell.edu
Telephone: +1-516-3873990 Fax: +1-516-3873930
Received: March 20, 2017
Peer-review started: March 23, 2017
First decision: May 3, 2017
Revised: August 2, 2017
Accepted: November 9, 2017
Article in press: November 9, 2017
Published online: February 6, 2018
Processing time: 318 Days and 9.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: In our 13 year experience at a community hospital infusion center, approximately 26% of inflammatory bowel disease patients receiving infliximab infusions received concomitant immunomodulator therapy. This is comparable to rates of combination therapy (CT) at major tertiary referral centers. However, there was a trend of decreased utilization of CT over the study period, even following the publication of SONIC. This suggests a need for further study to define the population with the most favorable risk-benefit ratio from CT, as well as the need for more direct guidelines from major societies.