Joanna C Robson, Amit Kiran, Joe Maskell, Andrew Hutchings, Nigel Arden, Bhaskar Dasgupta, William Hamilton, Akan Emin, David Culliford, Raashid A Luqmani
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the risk of aortic aneurysm in patients with giant cell arteritis (GCA) compared with age-, gender- and location-matched controls. METHODS: A UK General Practice Research Database (GPRD) parallel cohort study of 6999 patients with GCA and 41 994 controls, matched on location, age and gender, was carried out. A competing risk model using aortic aneurysm as the primary outcome and non-aortic-aneurysm-related death as the competing risk was used to determine the relative risk (subhazard ratio) between non-GCA and GCA subjects, after adjustment for cardiovascular risk factors...
January 2015: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases