COPD Patients Have Higher Risk of Shingles
- By BSTQ Staff
Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are at greater risk of shingles compared with the general population, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. And, the risk is greatest for patients taking oral steroids to treat COPD.
The study, which used data from the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database, included 8,846 patients with COPD and 33,944 subjects from the comparison cohort. Of the total 42,430 patients, 1,080 had an incident of shingles (or herpes zoster, which is a reactivation of the chicken pox virus) during the follow-up period. Of those, there were 321 cases of shingles identified among COPD patients, which is 16.4 cases per 1,000 person years, and 759 cases in the comparison cohort, which is 8.8 per 1,000 person years.
Because there is increasing evidence that COPD is an autoimmune disease and other autoimmune diseases, such as “rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, have been reported to be associated with an increase of herpes zoster, it is reasonable to hypothesize that immune dysregulation found in COPD may put patients at higher risk of developing herpes zoster,” says Dr. Hui-Wen Lin of the Taipei Medical University.