The impact of benzodiazepines on occurrence of pneumonia and mortality from pneumonia: A nested case-control and survival analysis in a population-based cohort

We read with interest the recent study done by Obiora et al 1 about the incidence and mortality with pneumonia for benzodiazepine users verses non-benzodiazepine users. We were interested to see whether these results would be generalisable to the Taiwanese population, therefore, we used the National Health Insurance Database of 22 million (2002) population in order to investigate the association of benzodiazepines and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). We selected window size of 1, 2 and 3 months to compute odds ratios of the diagnosis of pneumonia and presence of benzodiazepine prescription filling in all age and sex groups. We took patients having CAP identified through ICD-9-CM (480–486) codes (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, and Clinical Modification) and identified medications from their prescription using ATC (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical) drug classification codes (N05BA01, N05BA02, N05BA06) system for benzodiazepines.