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26-02-2018 | Pediatrics | News

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TNF inhibitor use may not increase pediatric malignancy risk

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medwireNews: Children with autoimmune disorders have an increased cancer risk relative to the general population, but this risk appears to not be exacerbated by tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitor use, suggests an analysis of US administrative claims data.

Among 15,598 children who received TNF inhibitors for juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), pediatric inflammatory bowel disease, or pediatric plaque psoriasis in 2000–2014, 15 developed a malignancy, as did 42 of their 73,839 counterparts not treated with TNF inhibitors, giving similar standardized incidence ratios (SIRs) of 2.9 and 2.1, respectively.

And after adjusting for the data source, TNF inhibitor use versus no use gave a nonsignificant hazard ratio (HR) for incident malignancy of 1.58.

Lead researcher Timothy Beukelman, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the USA, and colleagues summarize in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases that TNF inhibitor use seems to not significantly increase the risk for malignancy.

But they point out that the one exception could be lymphoma, for which the SIR for TNF inhibitor use was 6.0 compared with 2.7 for no use, and the adjusted HR was 2.64, although this was not significant and the analysis was limited by the small number of lymphomas.

By Shreeya Nanda

medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare. © 2018 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group

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