Weekly or Monthly Glucocorticoid Regimens effective for Treatment of Graves' Orbitopathy

Based on limited data, weekly or monthly regimens should be preferred for treating individuals with moderately severe Graves' orbitopathy (GO), says an article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology.

Intravenous glucocorticoid (GC) therapy has been suggested to treat moderately severe Graves' orbitopathy; however, the best regimen is still being debated. As a result, Jun Jia and colleagues conducted this network meta-analysis to objectively establish the comparative effectiveness and safety of several intravenous GC regimens for the treatment of GO, including daily, weekly, and monthly intravenous regimes.

From the inception of each database to March 2021, researchers searched Medline (via PubMed), EMBASE (via OVID), and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (via OVID) for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) investigating the comparative efficacy and safety of different intravenous GC regimes in GO patients. The most recent search was conducted in June 2021. The original studies' risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias assessment technique. The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation was used to do a random-effects Bayesian network meta-analysis. To rate all regimes, the ranking probabilities of all regimes were determined. The ADDIS program was used for statistical analysis.