Early warning report
Extracorporeal photopheresis
Health technology assessment
|Updated
Photopheresis is a procedure by which blood cells harvested from patients is activated with a photosensitive drug and UV light, before being returned to the patient.
Summary
• Photopheresis has been given to patients with Crohn's disease, the effectiveness has not been sufficiently studied.
• Photopheresis has been applied to patients with organ transplantation to prevent acute rejection. The documentation is one RCT and case series.
Safety
• There appears to be few serious adverse events associated with photopheresis. Reported adverse events were infections, hypotension, nausea, and headache.
Ongoing trials:
• We identified several ongoing trials that assess clinical responses to photopheresis. Some studies were randomised controlled trials. Results from two ongoing trials on photopheresis in chronic graft versus host disease will hopefully provide higher quality evidence to assess the clinical usefulness of photopheresis.
Current use:
• Norwegian guidelines recommend photopheresis for certain patients with lymphoma. This is in line with recommendations given in UK and Australia.
Conclusion:
Low quality evidence have shown that ECP may improve clinical response in patients with advanced disease refractory to standard treatment. We cannot though exclude the possibility that this body of evidence is due to publication bias, because studies registered as completed has not been published.