Off Label Prescribing as Good as On Label

Once a drug has been approved for some use it may be legally prescribed for any use. New uses for old drugs are discovered quite often so off-label uses can be very different from FDA approved uses. Mitomycin, for example, was approved to treat stomach and pancreatic cancer but is used off-label in laser-eye surgery. Drugs prescribed off-label have not been through FDA-approved efficacy trials for the off-label use. In Assessing the FDA via the Anomaly of Off-Label Drug Prescribing I pointed out that off-label prescribing, therefore, gives us a window onto a world with much less FDA regulation.

Since off-label prescribing is common and in rapidly progressing areas of medicine often the gold-standard, I argued that the behavior of physicians validated off-label prescribing and demonstrated that physicians were willing and able to draw upon non-FDA sources of information to make rational prescribing decisions. Dan Klein and I also showed that physicians are supportive of off-label prescribing saying, for example, that it would be “crazy” to require FDA approval for off-label uses.

The support of physicians for off-label prescribing is telling but not dispositive. Perhaps physicians make hubristic mistakes in prescribing off-label. A new paper by Ladanie et al. (including John Ioannidis) provides important information. The authors search the literature for all the RCTs when an off-label drug was pitted against an on-label drug. They conclude:

Our meta-epidemiological analysis of 25 different treatment indications for off-label drug use provides no empirical evidence supporting any assumption of generally inferior treatment
effects associated with off-label use. On the contrary, the summary effect estimates across all indications would even be compatible with more favorable effects, on average, of the off-label
treatment. However, the heterogeneity is substantial and the on-label comparators are not necessarily the best approved treatment option in all 25 topics. While some off-label
treatments are clearly better, others are clearly not.

The finding is especially impressive because although off-label treatments are sometimes the gold standard they are also often used when standard treatments have failed. Thus, in an RCT, off-label treatments could be worse on average and yet still provide a very useful weapon in the medical armory.

One might argue that if off-label treatments are as good as FDA-approved treatments then the FDA should have higher standards. FDA required clinical trials, however, already cost hundreds of millions of dollars and years of effort, creating drug lag and drug loss. Rather than condemning the FDA, what these results indicate is that the medical system–physicians, hospitals, insurers, scientists–does a good job at evaluating new uses for old drugs. As Dan Klein and I noted in our precis on off-label prescribing:

The off-label experience testifies to the fact that much knowledge about efficacy and safety is produced outside the FDA regulatory apparatus. The Pharmacopoeia’s recognition of off-label
indications years ahead of the FDA demonstrates that physicians and scientists have certified thousands of drug indications quite independently of the FDA, even when those indications are not
very closely related to the original indications. In addition to the Pharmacopoeia, there are several other forms of professional certification, including the American Hospital Formulary Service Drug Information, HMO formularies, and a wide array of specialist professional periodicals and information services. NIH studies, clinical results and determinations from other countries, and other professional, science-based judgments are examples of nongovernmental, non-mandatory certification.

Hat tip: Michelle Dawson.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed