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Abstract
Objective
We wanted to investigate the incidence of serious infections among the rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients who were treated with tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) antagonists.
Methods
We enrolled the 175 RA patients who were treated with TNF-α antagonists for at least 3 months during February 2003 to July 2008, and these patients were in the SMART-b cohort of Kangnam St. Mary's hospital. Patients were prescribed infliximab, etanercept or adalimumab. The data was retrospectively collected.
Results
The incidence of serious infections among the RA patients treated with TNF-α was significantly increased according to the survival analysis, as compared with that of those patient treated with conventional DMARDs (p < 0.01). The most common serious infection was pneumonia. There was no significant difference in the incidence of serious infections among the three TNF-α antagonists used in this study (p=0.96). But the serious infections occurred more often in the patients who received more than 10 mg methotrexate (MTX) per week (p=0.02).
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Fig. 1.
Incidence of serious infection in rheumatoid arthritis patients according to TNF- antagonists exposure (p.01). ∗TNF- antagonists group, conventional DMARDs group.
Fig. 2.
Incidence of serious infection among TNF- antagonists (p=0.96). ∗Inflixim ab, Etanercept, Adalimumab
Table 1.
Baseline characteristics of enrolled RA patients
Table 2.
Incidence of serious infection in RA patients
Table 3.
Characteristics in RA patients exposed to TNF α antagonists according to serious infection
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