Cardiovascular risk is not increased in patients with chronic urticaria: A retrospective population-based cohort study

Abstract

Chronic urticaria (CU) is a common condition characterized by daily or almost daily occurrence of wheals, angioedema, or both over a period of more than 6 weeks (1). CU is classified into inducible (CIndU) and spontaneous forms (CSU). The annual period prevalence of CSU was recently estimated in an Italian cohort as between 0.02% and 0.38%, whereas a German study showed a lifetime prevalence of CU at 1.8% (2, 3). While an association between CU and certain autoimmune diseases is well-established (3), CSU was surprisingly associated with obesity in a recent Italian study (4). Moreover, in a South Korean cohort of 131 patients with CU, metabolic syndrome was present in 30% of patients, and these individuals had particularly poor clinical outcomes and a more severe disease course (5). Finally, a population-based Taiwanese study of 9798 adults with CU recently showed that the condition was significantly associated with having received a prior diagnosis of hyperlipidaemia (6). Despite the above observations, no study has examined a possible association between CU and cardiovascular (CV) disease. We therefore investigated the risk of myocardial infarction (MI), ischaemic stroke, CV death, and major adverse CV events (MACE; a composite of MI, ischemic stroke, and CV death), in patients with CU and CIndU, respectively, in a nationwide cohort using prospectively collected administrative data.