Impact of Medications on COVID-19 Outcomes in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Analysis of Over 6,000 Patients from an International Registry

The Surveillance Epidemiology of Coronavirus Under Research Exclusion for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (SECURE-IBD) database, an international, collaborative database created to monitor COVID-19 outcomes in IBD patients, has previously reported that corticosteroids and mesalamine/sulfasalazine are associated with an increased risk of severe COVID-19 while tumor necrosis factor (TNF) antagonists do not impact risk.1 A follow-up report observed that patients on combination therapy with TNF antagonists and thiopurines appeared to be at higher severe COVID-19 risk.2 However, at that time the number of reported cases was too low to fully evaluate the risk of other IBD therapies. As the cases reported to SECURE-IBD have increased substantially, more granular analyses evaluating other IBD medication classes (including combination therapies) and adjusting for more covariates are possible. In this study, we compared associations between multiple medication classes and adverse COVID-19 outcomes in the SECURE-IBD database