Mortality Rates, Treatment Effectiveness, & Lupus

Research on lupus mortality rates A recently published study in the journal Annual Rheumatic Disease explored mortality rates over time with the help of data from Ontario, Canada area over 42 years. The researchers found significant decreases in two types of mortality rates: all-cause and cause-specific. However, the standardized mortality ratio is still about 3. This means that Lupus Warriors have a 3x higher risk of mortality as compared to people without lupus. The data that the study used was large for an SLE study – it was made up of 1,732 patients from the Toronto Lupus Clinic, who were tracked from 1971 to 2013. Many other studies have used this data to conclude that mortality rates are decreasing. But this study further broke it down into deaths caused by lupus and by age, also known as “cause-specific” and “age-specific” deaths. A different study looking at 770 Egyptian SLE patients found slightly higher survival rates (97.4% for 5 years and 96.3% for 10 years) with similar causes of death.

Still puzzling over something?