CONTEXT:  No great surprise the MS patients are at a higher risk of infections, but good use of retrospective data analyses to see exactly what is going on – well in US patients anyway. IMPACT:  Medium READ TIME:  2 mins Quality Level Mean [1 – 10]:  7 1. “Outpatient claims and inpatient hospitalizations for infections — especially urinary and kidney infections — were higher among people with multiple sclerosis (MS) than controls, a large retrospective study of commercial insurance records showed.”  2. “MS patients were more than four times as likely to be hospitalized with urinary and kidney infections as others, reported Riley Bove, MD, of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco.”  3. “The study evaluated relative risks for outpatient claims and inpatient hospitalizations for specific infections among 87,755 patients with MS and 87,755 control patients, using information from the IQVIA Real World Data adjudicated claims database from January 2010 through June 2019.”  4. “Compared with controls, MS patients had a higher relative risk of inpatient hospitalizations for the following infections:. Opportunistic infections included pneumocystis pneumonia, cryptosporidiosis, mycobacteria, bartonellosis, other mycoses, cryptococcosis, cytomegaloviral disease, human papillomavirus, other viral hepatitis, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, Epstein-Barr virus, histoplasmosis, toxoplasmosis, and Legionella.”  5. “For outpatient diagnoses, MS patients had a higher relative risk of infections that were:. “We weren’t able to go into details about the potential mechanisms for our findings,” Bove said.”  Source URL: https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/actrims/91445