Safety of Anti-TNF Treatment in Liver Transplant Recipients: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Little is known about the risk of serious infection when combining anti-tumour necrosis factor [TNF] therapy for refractory inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] with immunosuppression after liver transplantation [LT]. Our aim was to investigate the infection risk in this patient group by systematic review and meta-analysis of the available data.

A search was conducted for full papers and conference proceedings through September 2015, regarding liver transplant recipients and anti-TNF therapy. All studies were appraised using the adapted Newcastle-Ottawa Scale [NOS]. Two reviewers independently extracted patient data [age, duration of follow-up, number of all infections, number of serious infections, time since transplant]. As an additional control population, primary sclerosing cholangitis [PSC]-IBD patients from the Leiden University Medical Center [LUMC] LT cohort were used. Poisson regression was used to compare serious infections (according to International Conference on Harmonisation [ICH] definition) per patien-year follow-up between the anti-TNF and control groups.

In all 465 articles and abstracts were identified, of which eight were included. These contained 53 post-LT patients on anti-TNF therapy and 23 post-LT patients not exposed to anti-TNF therapy. From the LUMC LT-cohort, 41 PSC patients with PSC-IBD not exposed to anti-TNF therapy were included as control population. The infection rate for TNF-exposed patients was 0.168 serious infections per patient year, compared with 0.149 in the control patients (rate ratio 1.12 [95% confidence interval: 0.233-5.404, P = 0.886]. When correcting for time since transplant, the infection rate was 0.194 in the TNF-exposed vs 0.115 in the non-exposed [p = 0.219].

No significant increase in the rate of serious infection was observed in LT recipients with PSC-IBD during exposure to anti-TNF therapy.