Mortality among patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) hospitalized for COVID-19 was lower among patients taking disease-modifying therapy (DMT), according to study findings published in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been concern that patients receiving immunocompromising or immunomodulating drugs may be at increased risk for poorer COVID-19 outcomes. Patients with MS often receive such treatments and many patients were told at the beginning of the pandemic to withhold DMT. To date, there remains a paucity of robust data which evaluates the effect of DMTs in the course of a COVID-19 infection among patients with MS.
Data for this study were sourced from the Veterans Affairs (VA) Corporate Data Warehouse. Patients (n=258) with MS who were hospitalized at a VA center for COVID-19 between March 2020 and October 2021 were evaluated for all-cause mortality at 30 days. For the comparator group, patients with MS were propensity matched with the general population of patients (n=49,479) hospitalized with COVID-19. DMTs were defined as all DMTs except for anti-CD20 inhibitors, due to previous reports of increased mortality.
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