Lupus Is a Leading Cause of Death Among Young Women

A recent study in April 2018, published in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatology, revealed that systemic lupus erythematosus is a leading cause of death among young women.

The authors of the study, Eric Y. Yen, M.D., and Ram R. Singh, M.D., both from the University of California at Los Angeles, took records from several facilities of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiological Research database and focused on female death counts related to lupus. The researchers took the death counts of women from the online Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System Database and noticed that lupus was not featured as a leading cause of death in the CDC's annual ranking, which already includes 113 possible causes.

After narrowing down the data, and filtering out some irrelevant information, the prospect became much worse for women with lupus. When analyzing data from 2000 to 2015, there were 28,411 female deaths with systemic lupus erythematosus listed as either an underlying or contributing cause of death. In this time period, lupus ranked among the top 20 leading causes of death in women between the ages of 5 and 64.

When applying this same filter to women who were 15 to 24 years old, lupus ranked as the 10th leading cause of death. In the 25 to 34 age range, lupus ranked 14th and repeated itself in the 35 to 44 age range. In subjects aged 10 to 14 years, lupus came in 15th place as a leading cause of death.

Also, after filtering out three common external injuries as causes of death in African-American and Hispanic women, systemic lupus erythematosus came out as the 5th leading cause of death in women aged 15 to 24 years, 6th place in women aged 25 to 34 years old, and 8th place for those aged 35 to 44 years old.

Lupus is a not-so new cause of death like these researchers thought originally. Read on to learn more about the seriousness of systemic lupus erythematosus.