Infection mitigation a necessity in lupus patients

Excerpt

There are higher infection-related mortalities in Asian systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients as compared to cardiovascular complications and malignancies seen in the Caucasian population [1]. However, literature evaluating infection characteristics and outcomes in Asian SLE patients is limited; hence, we read with great interest Teh et al.’s paper which highlights the significant morbidity of infections in this cohort [2]. We previously published a retrospective study evaluating the characteristics and outcomes of hospitalized lupus nephritis (LN) patients with infections [3]. In comparison to the author’s paper which involved SLE patients (64.8% had renal involvement), we found more deaths and infections among LN as compared to SLE patients which were consistent with findings from previous studies [4, 5]. There were 21 deaths (11.2%) in the author’s cohort of 125 SLE patients with infections, with a higher proportion of LN among those with infection-related deaths (80.9% vs 63.5%). We had 11 deaths (23.9%) in 46 LN patients with infection-related hospital admissions and 6 deaths (13%) were infection-related. …