Faselis C, Zeng-Treitler Q, Cheng Y, et al. - In patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), results showed that the incidence of long QT syndrome and arrhythmia-related hospitalization is low during the first year after the initiation of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) or another nonbiologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug. There was no evidence that HCQ therapy is correlated with a higher risk of adverse cardiovascular events or death.

• Between October 1, 2001, and December 31, 2017, researchers performed an active comparator safety study of HCQ in a propensity score-matched cohort of 8,852 US veterans newly diagnosed as having RA. In this study, individuals had a mean ± SD age of 64 ± 12 years, 14% were women, and 28% were African American.

• Three long QT syndrome events occurred (0.03%), 2 of which occurred in patients receiving HCQ.

• In this study, 30 occurred in patients in the HCQ group (hazard ratio [HR] correlated with HCQ 1.16 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.68–1.95]) among 56 arrhythmia-related hospitalizations (0.63%).

• In the HCQ and non-HCQ groups, all-cause mortality occurred in 144 (3.25%) and 136 (3.07%) of the patients, respectively (HR correlated with HCQ 1.06 [95% CI, 0.84–1.34]).

• There were no long QT syndrome events, 2 arrhythmia-related hospitalizations (none in the HCQ group), and 13 deaths (6 in the HCQ group) during the first 30 days of follow-up.