Comparative outcomes of COVID-19 in patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome treated with hydroxychloroquine versus methotrexate: a retrospective cohort study

TL;DR

This study found that patients with Sjögren’s syndrome treated with hydroxychloroquine had a lower risk of getting COVID-19 compared to those on methotrexate.

Contribution

The first large-scale head-to-head comparison of hydroxychloroquine and methotrexate in Sjögren’s syndrome patients regarding COVID-19 risk.

Findings

Hydroxychloroquine-treated patients had a 25.9% lower risk of contracting COVID-19 compared to methotrexate-treated patients.

Younger and unvaccinated patients on hydroxychloroquine had significantly lower risk of COVID-19.

Hydroxychloroquine was associated with lower risk of adverse outcomes in patients with chronic kidney disease and neoplasms.

Abstract

People with rheumatic diseases are considered at risk for severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) because of their underlying abnormal immune responses and frequent disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) use. We aimed to explore COVID-19 outcomes in patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) receiving different conventional synthetic DMARDs.

The study was a retrospective analysis of real data from the TriNetX platform between 1 January 2020 and 30 June 2023. We compared COVID-19 outcomes between cohorts of pSS patients treated with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and methotrexate (MTX).

After propensity score matching, 1045 and 1045 pSS patients in the HCQ and MTX cohorts were included in the analysis. Our study revealed that the risk of COVID-19 in the HCQ cohort was significantly 25.9% lower than that in the MTX cohort. Among 18–64-year-old patients and unvaccinated patients, those in the HCQ cohort had a significantly lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than did those in the MTX cohort. Regarding the comorbidities of chronic kidney disease and neoplasms, the HCQ cohort had a significantly lower risk of adverse outcomes than the MTX cohort.

This is the first study in which a significant number of pSS patients was enrolled and head-to-head to compare the risk of COVID-19 incidence and adverse outcomes between those receiving HCQ and those receiving MTX, and we concluded that the risk of COVID-19 incidence was significantly lower in the HCQ cohort than in the MTX cohort. However, there were no significant differences in adverse COVID-19 outcomes between the cohorts.

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