Page 65 - Fertility in Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis Vruchtbaarheid van vrouwen met reumatoïde artritis

Statistical analysis
The primary outcome was the occurrence of a miscarriage before a gestational age of 16 weeks. The 9 variables of interest were maternal age at conception, presence of RF (at enrollment), presence of ACPAs (at enrollment), preconception DAS28, periconception use of nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) (daily or weekly during the preconception visit), use of sulfasalazine, use of prednisone, past MTX use, and total number of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) (current and past).
Differences between women who miscarried and women with an ongoing pregnancy
were compared using Student’s t-test or Fisher’s exact test, as appropriate. Disease
activity scores before conception and after miscarriage were compared using
a paired t-test. Two-sided P values less than 0.05 were considered signi cant. 4 Multivariate analysis was performed using logistic regression with purposeful
selection of covariates, with a P value of <0.20 used as the signi cance level for inclusion, and subsequent exclusion of covariates based on a P value of >0.10.14 The statistical package used was STATA/SE 13.1 (StataCorp).
RESULTS
Characteristics of the patients
There were 239 preconception visits within the PARA study, of which 58 did not result in a pregnancy within the followup period. Of the women who became pregnant, 13 participated twice and 2 women participated 3 times. Only their rst study episode was used. Two patients were excluded: 1 patient had a molar pregnancy, and 1 patient had a pregnancy loss after intrauterine treatment during a twin pregnancy. There were 162 pregnancies for analysis.
The baseline characteristics of the patients are shown in Table 1. Eighty-two patients (50.6%) had already experienced at least one pregnancy, Of whom 22 (26.8%) had experienced one or more miscarriages in the past. During the analyzed study episode, 28 women (17.3%; 95% con dence interval 12.2%–24.0%) had a miscarriage: 14 miscarriages occurred in the second month of pregnancy (range 5.6–8.6 weeks), 9 miscarriages in the third month (9.3–11.9 weeks), and 5 miscarriages after 13 weeks of gestation (13.7–14.7 weeks). One woman had miscarried once before, and 1 woman had 3 previous miscarriages. There were no pregnancy losses between 16 and 20 weeks of gestation.
Miscarriages in RA
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