This study aimed to determine the association between colchicine use and the incidence of diabetes in a cohort of patients with gout.
This is a retrospective study of 27,876 adults with gout identified via the Veterans Integrated Services Network 16 data warehouse. Patients had up to 11 years of follow-up (January 1999 through December 2010). The final study sample consisted of 1046 pairs of 1:1 propensity score-matched patients from the colchicine treated and control cohorts. Time to first diabetes development since the first gout diagnosis was modeled.
After the propensity score matching, the 12-month baseline variables (eg, age, sex, race, index year, body mass index, serum uric acid, antigout drug use, and health care use) were comparable between the matched cohorts (P > 0.05 for all). Among the 1046 matched pairs, 234 patients who had taken colchicine and 224 patients who had never taken colchicine developed diabetes; the incidence rates were 38.95 and 39.02 per 1000 patient-years, respectively. In Poisson and Cox proportional hazards regression, the risk of incident diabetes was reduced with increased duration of colchicine use, but the difference was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). In a time-varying Cox proportional hazards model, the hazard ratio for incident diabetes among patients who had taken colchicine was 0.877 (95% CI, 0.662-1.163; P = 0.362) compared with those who had not taken colchicine.
This study suggests a possible duration- or dose-related association between colchicine use and reduced risk of diabetes in adults with gout even though the risk reduction was not significant. Further studies are needed to confirm findings from this study.