A recent study that included over 22 million adult patients from South Korea and Japan revealed that an acute Covid-19 infection could be linked to a higher risk of developing autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases up to one year after getting infected.
This includes conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, Sjögren syndrome, systemic sclerosis, polymyalgia rheumatica, mixed connective tissue disease, dermatomyositis, polymyositis, polyarteritis nodosa, or vasculitis. According to the study’s findings, even vaccinated patients who survived a severe Covid-19 infection could be at a higher risk of suffering from one of these conditions.
The researchers based in Seoul, South Korea, analyzed data from two national population-based cohort studies in Japan and Korea to delve into how Covid-19 impacts longterm risk for autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases (AIRD). The data belonged to more than 10 million Koreans and 12 million Japanese adults who were older than 20 years. That included patients who tested positive for Covid-19 from 2020 to 2021.
The team gained access to every study participants’ demographic and mortality data from each country’s insurance database. They also studied the participants’ history of cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and respiratory diseases.
Among the South Korean participants, 3.9% of them had a history of Covid-19 and close to 1% had been diagnosed with influenza in the past. The percentage of Japanese participants who had Covid-19 was higher at 8.2% and again, close to 1% reported having a case of influenza.
“We found increased risk for incident AIRD up to 12 months after COVID-19 diagnosis compared with influenza-infected and uninfected control patients. Greater severity of acute COVID-19 was associated with higher risk for incident AIRD,” the researchers noted.
However, the researchers admitted that the study has several limitations. Their results were from a period of the Covid-19 pandemic before the Omicron variant had emerged. Also, the team highlighted that certain AIRD outcomes were uncommon and some of their estimates were “imprecise.”
Three studies that were published in 2023 also found an elevated risk for autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases (AIRD) among people who tested positive for Covid-19 compared to those who did not get a Covid-19 diagnosis. A study published in Clinical Rheumatology with study participants who got Covid-19 in 2020 reported a 42.63% heightened risk for developing an autoimmune disease after catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
An autoimmune rheumatic disease affects and disables a target cell and human tissue. The most common one is rheumatoid arthritis in which the immune system attacks healthy cells and causes inflammation, swelling, and debilitating pain in several joints.
Rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) most commonly affect women with a prevalence rate that is greater than 1% of the adult female population in the United States of America. Because these diseases mainly occur in mid to late adulthood, the major comorbidities for rheumatic autoimmune diseases are premature cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
The study was recently published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
