MS patients were more than four times as likely to be hospitalized with urinary and kidney infections as others, reported Riley Bove, MD, of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco.
They also had nearly twice the risk of outpatient urinary and kidney infections, Bove said at ACTRIMS Forum 2021, the annual meeting of the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis.
Few population-level risk estimates for specific categories of infections in MS patients exist in the U.S., she noted.
“These findings, from a modern U.S.-based cohort, support an elevated risk for a number of infection types in patients with MS,” Bove said. “Specifically, the elevated risk of urinary and kidney infections points to a need for better screening and management of bladder function,” she told MedPage Today.
The study evaluated relative risks for outpatient claims and inpatient hospitalizations for specific infections among 87,755 patients with MS and 87,755 control patients, using information from the IQVIA Real World Data adjudicated claims database from January 2010 through June 2019.
Participants in the MS cohort had two or more MS diagnoses 30 or more days apart; controls had two diagnoses for any other condition more than 30 or more days apart. The index date was a randomly selected office visit. All participants had no antibiotic or antiviral claims 60 days before the index date and no claims for pregnancy, inpatient residential care or end-stage renal disease facility, HIV, or HCV. To read this article in its entirety clink here: Infection risk with MS.