Antihistamine use and osteoarthritis or joint pain

Antihistamines have been reported to be linked with less pain in osteoarthritis. We aimed to estimate associations between antihistamine use and three outcomes: prevalent osteoarthritis, current joint pain, and developing osteoarthritis.

We included 25 003 participants of EpiHealth - a cohort of persons aged 45 to 75 from Malmö/Uppsala in Sweden. Participants self-reported the presence of allergy, joint pain and osteoarthritis at a study visit between years 2010 and 2016. Further, we obtained data about diagnoses of allergy and osteoarthritis from health-care registers (primary, specialist and inpatient care). Exposure was prescribed dispensed antihistamines (H1-antagonists) during ∼6 years preceding the EpiHealth visit retrieved from the Prescribed Drugs Register. The outcomes were osteoarthritis (any location), pain in knees/hips/hands-wrists at the examination (cross-sectional) and future incident diagnosis of osteoarthritis (longitudinal, in a cohort free of osteoarthritis at EpiHealth). We report risk ratios (95% confidence intervals [CI]) from logistic regression and hazard ratios (HR) from Cox regression, from models adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, allergy and use of healthcare. We used prescribed dispensed penicillin as negative control.

The associations between use of antihistamines and osteoarthritis/joint pain at EpiHealth were 1.13 (95%CI 1.06, 1.20) and 1.02 (0.99, 1.05), respectively. The HR of future incident osteoarthritis diagnosis with use of antihistamines was 1.15 (1.03, 1.28). The association (HR) between penicillin use and future incident osteoarthritis diagnosis was 1.16 (1.07, 1.25).

In a large population-based observational cohort, use of antihistamines was neither associated with less joint pain/osteoarthritis nor lower risk of future osteoarthritis.