Hydroxychloroquine and Diabetes Risk in UK Biobank Patients with RA/SLE, 2006-2022

UK Biobank data from 502,392 participants recruited between 2006 and 2010 was used to study the association between hydroxychloroquine use and incident type 2 diabetes mellitus in patients with rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus. The study, authored by Chen-Xia Li and published on figshare, followed 6,793 eligible patients for a mean of 13.78 years, with results indicating a reduced hazard ratio for diabetes among hydroxychloroquine users.

Use Cases

• Assessing the association between hydroxychloroquine exposure and diabetes incidence based on longitudinal patient follow-up.
• Modeling disease risk using hazard ratios adjusted for covariates like age, sex, race, education, and BMI mentioned in the description.
• Conducting pharmacoepidemiological studies on rheumatic disease populations based on the UK Biobank cohort.
• Validating clinical hypotheses using ICD-10 coded diagnoses and time-to-event data as described in the methods.

Strengths

• Longitudinal follow-up with a mean duration of 13.78 years.
• Analysis is based on a large initial cohort of 502,392 UK Biobank participants.
• Results include hazard ratios with confidence intervals and p-values from univariate and multivariate models.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is very small (35.8 KB), suggesting it contains summary results rather than raw patient-level data.

Provenance

Source

UK Biobank

Collection Method

Prospective cohort study using ICD-10 codes for diagnosis.

Time Range

Recruitment 2006-2010, follow-up until 2022.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-14 13:07:50; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom