Chung WS, et al. - Researchers gauged the incidence and risk of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in patients who underwent appendectomy. A significantly higher risk of SLE was seen in women aged ≤ 49 years who underwent appendectomy.

Methods

• Experts identified the patients from the National Health Insurance Research Database aged > 20 years who received appendectomy from 2000 to 2011 and assigned to the appendectomy cohort.
• They randomly selected the patients without appendectomy from the NHIRD and assigned to the control cohort; they were frequency matched to each study patient at a 4:1 ratio by sex, age, and index year.
• They followed all until SLE diagnosis, withdrawal from the National Health Insurance program, or the end of 2011.
• Cox models were used in order to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) to compare the risk of SLE between the appendectomy and control cohorts.

Results

• As per data, from 23.74 million people in the cohort, 80,582 patients undergoing appendectomy and 323,850 patients without appendectomy were followed for 723,438 and 2,931,737 person-years, respectively.
• Results demonstrated that a 2.04-fold higher risk of SLE was seen in the appendectomy cohort vs the control cohort.
• Findings suggested a 2.27-fold higher risk of SLE in women aged ≤ 49 years than the corresponding controls.