Metabolic and cardiovascular benefits of hydroxychloroquine in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

• Published in: Annals of the rheumatic diseases Vol. 78; no. 3; p. e21
• Main Authors: Li, Hui-Zi, Xu, Xiang-He, Lin, Nan, Lu, Hua-Ding
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BMJ Publishing Group LTD 01.03.2019
• Subjects: Bias; Hydroxychloroquine; Meta-analysis; Metabolism; Rheumatoid arthritis; Rheumatology; Studies; Systematic review; China; cardiovascular disease; rheumatoid arthritis; osteoarthritis
• ISSN: 0003-4967; 1468-2060
• DOI: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2018-213157

Correspondence to Professor Hua-Ding Lu, Department of Orthopedics, The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519000, China; johnniehuading@163.com With great interest, we read the paper recently published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases titled ‘Metabolic and cardiovascular benefits of hydroxychloroquine in patients with rheumatoid arthritis(RA): a systematic review and meta-analysis’.1 In the study, the authors revealed that hydroxychloroquine may benefit the metabolic profile and to a lesser extent cardiovascular events in patients with RA. [...]the current meta-analysis was conducted according to the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, but the protocol, which should have been predefined, was not registered in any platforms, such as the Cochrane Library, PROSPERO (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/) and BMJ Open, which may affect its transparency and reproducibility.2 Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and the databases for the American College of Rheumatology and the European League Against Rheumatism annual meetings were searched in this study, but these databases seemed to be not enough to retrieve all the eligible studies. [...]we respect the great work done by the authors, but the study should be interpreted with the aforementioned limitations, and further high-quality multicentre RCTs with larger sample size should be warranted to clarify the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine in patients with RA.