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Risks associated with chronic corticosteroid use are well known, but we have little data on risks associated with steroid bursts in children. Researchers used the Taiwanese National Health Database to examine risks associated with oral steroid bursts of 14 days or shorter in children.
Among 4.5 million children in the database, 1 million who had received single steroid bursts in the previous 5 years were evaluated for adverse events. Compared with children who did not receive steroid bursts, children who received bursts had higher rates (at 5 to 30 days after steroid initiation) of gastrointestinal bleeding, sepsis, and pneumonia (incidence rate ratios, 1.41, 2.02, and 2.19, respectively). The pneumonia incidence rates per 1000 patient-years…