You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 80, Issue 10
  • Prospective study into COVID-19-like symptoms in patients with and without immune-mediated inflammatory diseases or immunomodulating drugs

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Prospective study into COVID-19-like symptoms in patients with and without immune-mediated inflammatory diseases or immunomodulating drugs
  1. Lotte van Ouwerkerk1,
  2. Andrea E van der Meulen-de Jong2,
  3. Maarten K Ninaber3,
  4. Y K Onno Teng4,
  5. Tom WJ Huizinga1,
  6. Cornelia F Allaart1
  1. 1 Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
  2. 2 Department of Gastroenterology, Leiden Universitair Medisch Centrum, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands
  3. 3 Department of Pulmonology, Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, Leiden, The Netherlands
  4. 4 Department of Nephrology, Leiden Universitair Medisch Centrum, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands
  1. Correspondence to Dr Lotte van Ouwerkerk, Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands; l.van_ouwerkerk{at}lumc.nl

https://doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2021-219958

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    With the arrival of SARS-CoV-2, it was asked whether our patients with immune-mediated inflammatory disorders, or who had an organ transplantation (IMDT patients) and/or use immunosuppressive medication (imed) are more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and/or a severe COVID-19 disease course. In the earliest reports on COVID-19, such patients were rarely described. Most reports were retrospectively collected, in various case series or cohorts without a control group.1–3 The Infection and Immunomodulation Inventory Initiative cohort study was started 10 March 2020 to prospectively register self-reported periods of illness with COVID-19-like symptoms (CLS) (see questionnaire in online supplemental table 1) and compare these between IMIDT patients with and without imed and controls as selected from the hospital database of the Leiden University Medical Center in March 2020. Patients were defined as being in outpatient care at the outpatient clinic for rheumatology, gastroenterology, pulmonology and/or nephrology and having an autoinflammatory or autoimmune disease or having had a solid organ transplantation with or without imed (verified from the medical records after participant’s informed consent). Controls were persons who had visited these outpatient clinics in the previous …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Josef S Smolen

    • Contributors Concept and design: LvO and CFA. Acquisition of data: LvO, CFA, MKN, YKOT and AEM-dJ. Analysis and interpretation: LvO, CFA, MKN, YKOT, AEM-dJ and TWJH. Drafting the manuscript: LvO and CFA. Revising the manuscript critically: MKN, YKOT, AEM-dJ and TWJH. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests AEM-dJ reports personal fees from Janssen, grants and personal fees from Takeda, personal fees from Galapogos, grants from Nestle and grants from Norgine outside the submitted work.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.