Prednisone Use and Risk of Mortality in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis: Moderation by Use of Disease‐Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs

Medications for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may affect survival. However, studies often include limited followup and do not account for selection bias in treatment allocation. Using a large longitudinal database, we examined the association between prednisone use and mortality in RA, and whether this risk was modified with concomitant disease‐modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) use, after controlling for propensity for treatment with prednisone and individual DMARDs.

[1]  S. Gabriel,et al.  Use of low-dose glucocorticoids and the risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in rheumatoid arthritis: what is the true direction of effect? , 2005, The Journal of rheumatology.

[2]  Brian T Fay,et al.  Associations of disease activity and treatments with mortality in men with rheumatoid arthritis: results from the VARA registry. , 2011, Rheumatology.

[3]  Elizabeth A Stuart,et al.  Improving propensity score weighting using machine learning , 2010, Statistics in medicine.

[4]  Leo Breiman,et al.  Random Forests , 2001, Machine Learning.

[5]  J. Fries,et al.  Propensity-adjusted association of methotrexate with overall survival in rheumatoid arthritis. , 2013, Arthritis and rheumatism.

[6]  A. Escalante,et al.  Glucocorticoid Dose Thresholds Associated With All‐Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality in Rheumatoid Arthritis , 2014, Arthritis & rheumatology.

[7]  Ahmed Ar,et al.  Corticosteroids: a review with emphasis on complications of prolonged systemic therapy. , 1989 .

[8]  J. Fries,et al.  The dimensions of health outcomes: the health assessment questionnaire, disability and pain scales. , 1982, The Journal of rheumatology.

[9]  A. Ahmed,et al.  Corticosteroids: a review with emphasis on complications of prolonged systemic therapy. , 1989, Annals of allergy.

[10]  M. Liang,et al.  The American Rheumatism Association 1987 revised criteria for the classification of rheumatoid arthritis. , 1988, Arthritis and rheumatism.

[11]  M. Sugihara Survival analysis using inverse probability of treatment weighted methods based on the generalized propensity score , 2010, Pharmaceutical statistics.

[12]  James M Robins,et al.  For Personal Use. Only Reproduce with Permission from the Lancet Publishing Group , 2022 .

[13]  D. Furst,et al.  Low dose long-term corticosteroid therapy in rheumatoid arthritis: an analysis of serious adverse events. , 1994, The American journal of medicine.

[14]  J. Kirwan,et al.  The effect of glucocorticoids on joint destruction in rheumatoid arthritis. The Arthritis and Rheumatism Council Low-Dose Glucocorticoid Study Group. , 1995, The New England journal of medicine.

[15]  Eduardo Soudah,et al.  Development and validation of a multivariate predictive model for rheumatoid arthritis mortality using a machine learning approach , 2017, Scientific Reports.

[16]  F. Wolfe,et al.  Corticosteroid use in rheumatoid arthritis: prevalence, predictors, correlates, and outcomes. , 2007, The Journal of rheumatology.

[17]  J. J. Bunim,et al.  Major undesirable side-effects resulting from prednisolone and prednisone. , 1955, Journal of the American Medical Association.