TNF drugs do not increase infection risk in arthritis patients

“Patients with autoimmune diseases who begin treatment with tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors are no more likely to develop serious infections than those who start treatment with conventional disease-modifying drugs,” according to research presented at the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting and published online Nov. 6 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Specifically, “among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who initiated treatment with a TNF inhibitor, the rate of serious infection requiring hospitalizations was 8.16 per 100 person-years,” whereas “the rate among patients with RA who started on a regimen using a conventional agent had a rate of 7.78 per 100 person-years, for an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.05 (95% CI 0.91 to 1.21), which was not significantly different.”