Year: 2023
Type: letter
Abstract: pyelonephritis, gastrointestinal infections, and meningitis as well as hospitalization for one of these infections.(4)As serious infections often lead to stopping and/or switching the immunosuppressant medication regimen, we opted not to assess the recurrent infections.As in all observational studies, the potential for unmeasured confounding is an important consideration.Our manuscript included the results of an E-value analysis to quantitatively report the robustness of our findings to potential unmeasured confounding.(5)The exclusion of 208 patients with missing covariates, which corresponds to 0.8% of the study population, would have been unlikely to impact our findings.Along those lines, body mass index, tobacco use, and immunization records were incompletely captured in our source database, as they are in most administrative health data, and thus they were not used in the propensity score.While these unmeasured factors would not be expected to impact the main findings of our study, we agree that additional observational studies in multiple populations and settings could strengthen the evidence for the safety of belimumab.Nonetheless, as the authors highlight, a major strength of our study is the use of a large, real-world population of nearly 4,000 belimumab initiators, and our findings provide reassurance about a lower risk of infection with belimumab use than with alternative oral immunosuppressants.
Source: Arthritis & Rheumatology
DOI: 10.1002/art.42692
Language: English
Subfield: Rheumatology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4386346486