Lopez Pineda A, Pourshafeie A, Ioannidis A, Leibold CM, Chan AL, Bustamante CD, Frankovich J, Wojcik GL. Discovering prescription patterns in pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome patients. J Biomed Inform. 2021 Jan;113:103664. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2020.103664. Epub 2020 Dec 28. PMID: 33359113.
- PANS has an inflammatory or autoimmune etiology associated with an infection.
- Longitudinal clustering can subset patients with polypharmacy treatments.
- Included 43 consecutive new-onset pre-pubertal patients who had at least 3 clinic visits. “We used a cut-off age of 12 years to include only pre-pubertal children, as hormones might play a role in psychiatric symptoms and behaviors.”
- Algorithm identified six clusters with distinct medication usage history which may represent clinician’s practice of treating PANS of different severities and etiologies i.e.,
- two most severe groups requiring high dose intravenous steroids
- two arthritic or inflammatory groups requiring prolonged nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)
- two mild relapsing/remitting group treated with a short course of NSAID.
- The psychometric scores as outcomes in each cluster generally improved within the first two years.
Gabriella True
