Background:
The gut-selective nature of vedolizumab has raised questions regarding increased joint pain or arthralgias with its use in IBD patients. Since arthralgias are seldom coded and thus difficult to study, few studies have examined the comparative risk of arthralgias between vedolizumab and tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi).
Objectives:
To evaluate the application of natural language processing (NLP) to identify arthralgias in the clinical notes, and to compare the risk of arthralgia between vedolizumab and TNFi in IBD.
Methods:
We performed a retrospective study using a validated electronic medical record (EMR) based IBD cohort from 2 large tertiary care centers. The index date was the first date of vedolizumab or TNFi prescription. Baseline covariates were assessed 1-year period before the index date; patients were followed 1-year after the index date. The primary outcome was arthralgias defined using NLP. Using inverse probability of treatment weight to balance the cohorts, we then constructed Cox regression models to calculate the hazard ratio (HR) for arthralgia in the vedolizumab vs TNFi groups.
Results:
We studied 367 patients on vedolizumab and 1,218 on TNFi IBD patients. Patients on vedolizumab were older, mean age 41.2 vs. 34.9 years, and had more prevalent use of immunomodulators, 52.3% vs. 31.9%, than TNFi users. Our data did not observe a significant increased risk of arthralgias in the vedolizumab group compared with TNFi (HR, 1.20; 95%CI, 0.97–1.49).
Conclusions:
In this large observational study, we did not find a significant increased risk of arthralgias associated with vedolizumab use compared with TNFi.