PHILADELPHIA -- Two new studies failed to find a solid link between anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) therapy and infections among rheumatoid arthritis patients.
Even though anti-TNF therapy is designed to interfere with immune response and so theoretically exposes a patient to a greater infection risk, two researchers told attendees at the American College of Rheumatology meeting here that they were unable to find such a relationship when they observed the overall infection landscape.
However, a third study that looked specifically at infections within joints, did note an increased risk of infection with anti-TNF therapy.
In the first study, Jeffrey Curtis, MD, MPH, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues were unable to distinguish differences in the incidence of infections among patients receiving anti-TNF therapy and those receiving treatment with more traditional disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDS).
"The infection-related safety profiles of the various biologic agents appear to be similar," Curtis said. "We found no significant increase in the adjusted risk for hospitalized or outpatient infections associated with anti-TNF therapy or other biologics compared with methotrexate and other nonbiologic disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs."
Curtis and colleagues identified 18,305 rheumatoid arthritis patients from the Consortium of Rheumatology Researchers of North America (CORRONA). Among those patients were 586 cases in which patients needed to be hospitalized for infections while on treatment, and 21,258 outpatient infections.
"The most important risk factors for serious infections were not biologic medications, as some might have expected, but instead were age, medical conditions such as emphysema, and rheumatoid arthritis-specific factors such as disease duration," Curtis said.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Rheumatology/Arthritis/16579