Hydroxychloroquine and the risk of respiratory infections among RA patients
Authors
Kremer, Joel M.Reed, George W.
Pappas, Dimitrios A.
Harrold, Leslie R.
Kane, Kevin J.
Greenberg, Jeffrey
Winthrop, Kevin
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Medicine, Division of RheumatologyDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2020-11-07Keywords
ArthritisEpidemiology
Hydroxychloroquine
Rheumatoid
SARS-CoV-2
COVID-19
Immune System Diseases
Musculoskeletal Diseases
Respiratory Tract Diseases
Rheumatology
Skin and Connective Tissue Diseases
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
OBJECTIVES: To determine the effect of hydroxychloroquine on the incidence of new respiratory infections in a large registry of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients compared with a matched cohort receiving other conventional disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (csDMARDs). METHODS: We reviewed physician-reported infections including upper respiratory infections (URI), bronchitis and pneumonia in the Corrona RA registry from June 2008 to February 2020 with the goal of comparing infections in biologic/targeted synthetic (b/ts) DMARDs naive HCQ starts compared with starts of other csDMARDs and no HCQ. Patients on different interventions were compared using time-varying adjusted Cox models adjusting for age, sex, duration of RA, BMI, disease activity, smoking status, concurrent medications, season of the year, year of onset and history of serious infections, diabetes or cardiovascular disease (CVD). A secondary analysis in a set of propensity-matched starts were also compared adjusting for time-varying covariates. The analysis was repeated including URI and bronchitis only and also for serious respiratory infections only. RESULTS: No evidence of differences was found in the incidence of any respiratory infection (URI, bronchitis, pneumonia) in patients receiving HCQ compared with other csDMARDs: HR=0.87 (0.70 to1.07) in adjusted analyses and HR=0.90 (0.70 to 1.17) in adjusted matched analysis. Similar results were found in the analysis of URI and bronchitis only and for serious respiratory infections only. CONCLUSIONS: In patients with RA, the risk for respiratory infections was similar among patients using HCQ as compared to other non-biologic DMARDs.Source
Kremer JM, Reed G, Pappas DA, Harold LR, Kane K, Greenberg J, Winthrop K. Hydroxychloroquine and the risk of respiratory infections among RA patients. RMD Open. 2020 Nov;6(3):e001389. doi: 10.1136/rmdopen-2020-001389. PMID: 33161375. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1136/rmdopen-2020-001389Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/41691PubMed ID
33161375Related Resources
Rights
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1136/rmdopen-2020-001389
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial.