Shannon Walker, MD, discusses the growing number of hemophilia treatment options and how diagnosis, age, lifestyle, and route of administration can help families choose the right treatment.
How do you choose the right prophylactic therapy for an individual patient?
Transcript
Yeah, that’s a great question. We have a lot more available than we used to. Some of it depends a little bit on the hemophilia diagnosis.
So, some of our medication options only work for patients with hemophilia A. We have some new ones now, as of the last year or so, that work for patients with both hemophilia A and hemophilia B.
Those, right now, are not for our younger patients. Those are for our more adolescent and young adult patients.
And so, really, just having the conversation with our families as to kind of which one is going to be the best for them is — is how we go about it. I try to make it, you know, as — as personalized a conversation as possible. We don’t have, you know, one that’s one-size-fits-all. It really depends on what our families are looking for.
A lot of the choice comes down to the route of administration. Some of our patients who have been doing venipuncture for a long time, have families that are very skilled at venipuncture, tend to kind of choose more of our factor products, especially if they’re very active in sports and want some kind of factor coverage for injuries related to sports and those sorts of things.
Other families who don’t have the venipuncture skills are very anxious at the idea of learning venipuncture or doing that on their children. We would kind of prefer more of our sub-Q options. And so, we can kind of talk about that with the families and the risk-benefits in that way.