Results
We identified 31,570 eligible patients during the study period. Of
these, 28,145 (89.2%) were treated with glucocorticoids on the day of
admission (Fig. 1).
Table 1 shows the patients’ baseline characteristics before and after
propensity score matching. Before propensity score matching,
significantly higher proportions of patients were using histamine-1
receptor blockers, histamine-2 receptor blockers, and beta 2-adrenergic
receptor stimulants in the glucocorticoids group than in the control
group.
The overall percentage of biphasic reactions within 7 days of admission
was 11.2% and 7-day all-cause mortality was 0.4% (Table 2). The
percentages of biphasic reactions that occurred on days 1, 2, and 3–7
of the initial reaction were 88.8%, 9.1%, and 2.1%, respectively.
One-to-four propensity-score matching created matched cohorts of 3,425
patients in the control group and 13,700 patients in the glucocorticoid
group. After propensity score matching, the distribution of patient
characteristics was well-balanced between the matched groups and there
were no statistically significant differences in rates of biphasic
reactions (odds ratio 1.03; 95% CI 0.86–1.24; p=0.14) or 7-day
all-cause mortality (odds ratio 0.68; 95% CI 0.40–1.17; p=0.16)
between the two groups (Table 2).
The results of three sensitivity analyses of traditional multivariable
regression analyses, propensity score adjustment, and inverse
probability of treatment weighting were similar to those using
propensity score matching for biphasic reactions (Table 3).