Colchicine Is a Weapon for Managing the Heart Disease Among Interstitial Lung Disease With Viral Infection: Have We Found the Holy Grail?

Jun-Jun Yeh; Tuey-Wen Hung; Cheng-Li Lin; Tsung-Tse Chen; Pei-Xuan Liw; Ya-Lun Yu; Chia-Hung Kao

doi:10.3389/fcvm.2022.925211

Colchicine Is a Weapon for Managing the Heart Disease Among Interstitial Lung Disease With Viral Infection: Have We Found the Holy Grail?

Front Cardiovasc Med. 2022 Jun 28:9:925211. doi: 10.3389/fcvm.2022.925211. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Jun-Jun Yeh^{1

2}, Tuey-Wen Hung³, Cheng-Li Lin^{2

4}, Tsung-Tse Chen³, Pei-Xuan Liw³, Ya-Lun Yu³, Chia-Hung Kao^{5

6

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Family Medicine, Geriatric Medicine, Chest Medicine and Medical Research, Ditmanson Medical Foundation Chia-Yi Christian Hospital, Chiayi, Taiwan.
² College of Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan.
³ Department of Family Medicine and Geriatric Medicine, Ditmanson Medical Foundation Chia-Yi Christian Hospital, Chiayi, Taiwan.
⁴ Management Office for Health Data, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan.
⁵ Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, College of Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan.
⁶ Department of Nuclear Medicine and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Center, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan.
⁷ Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Engineering, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan.
⁸ Center of Augmented Intelligence in Healthcare, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan.

Abstract

Background: This study investigated the effect of colchicine use on the risks of heart disease (HD), pericarditis, endocarditis, myocarditis, cardiomyopathy, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiac failure in patients having interstitial lung disease (ILD) with virus infection (ILD cohort).

Methods: We retrospectively enrolled ILD cohort between 2000 and 2013 from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Database and divided them into colchicine users (n = 12,253) and colchicine non-users (n = 12,253) through propensity score matching. The event of interest was the diagnosis of HD. The incidence of HD was analyzed using multivariate Cox proportional hazards models between colchicine users and the comparison cohort after adjustment for age, sex, medication, comorbidities, and index date based on the time-dependent analysis.

Results: Colchicine users had a significantly lower risk of HD (aHR = 0.87, 95% confidence interval (CI]) = 0.82-0.92) than did the colchicine non-user. For colchicine non-users as the reference, the aHR (95% CI) of the patients who received colchicine of 2-7, 8-30, 31-150, and > 150 days were 0.89 (0.81-0.98), 0.84 (0.76-0.94), 090 (0.80-0.99), and 0.83 (0.74-0.93), respectively; regardless of duration use, the lower risk of HD persisted in colchicine users. The cumulative incidence of HD in colchicine users was significantly lower than that in the colchicine non-users (log-rank p < 0.001).

Conclusion: The addition of short-term or long-term colchicine to standard medical therapy may have benefits to prevent the HD among the ILD patients concurrent with a virus infection or comorbidities even in elderly patients.

Keywords: cardiomyopathy; colchicine; endocarditis; myocarditis; pericarditis.