diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index bb72a99..557f721 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 Package: simcausal
 Type: Package
-Version: 0.5.2.00
+Version: 0.5.3.00
 Title: Simulating Longitudinal Data with Causal Inference Applications
 Authors@R: c(
     person("Oleg", "Sofrygin", role=c("aut", "cre"), email="oleg.sofrygin@gmail.com"),
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 23b3ad3..7631c94 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -76,3 +76,9 @@ simcausal 0.5.1
 * Switching to new naming convention for categorical distributions (rcat.b0, rcat.b1 and rcat.factor). Old rcategor.int and rcategor are still available and are deprecated.
 
 
+simcausal 0.5.3
+==============
+
+* Fixing a bug in that was identified due to changes to data.table (eval.MSM() was incorrectly checking for NA outcomes)
+* Fixing a CRAN error in test on R devel.
+
diff --git a/R/targetparam.r b/R/targetparam.r
index df40329..0b09b75 100644
--- a/R/targetparam.r
+++ b/R/targetparam.r
@@ -473,8 +473,10 @@ eval.MSM <- function(DAG, df_full, outnodes, outnode_nms, params.MSM, attrs, ver
     }
   }
 
-  naout_byaction <- sapply(df_full, function(df) any(is.na(df[,outcome]))) # CHECK THAT NO OUTCOME NODES ARE MISSING (NA)
-  if (any(naout_byaction)) stop("Unable to evaluate MSMs outcome "%+%outcome%+% ", for action(s) ", paste(names(df_full)[naout_byaction], collapse=","), ", some observations are censored before the outcome, check DAG(s) defining the action(s)")
+  naout_byaction <- sapply(df_full, function(df) any(is.na(df[[outcome]]))) # CHECK THAT NO OUTCOME NODES ARE MISSING (NA)
+  if (any(naout_byaction)) stop("Unable to evaluate MSMs outcome "%+%outcome%+% ", for action(s) ",
+                                paste(names(df_full)[naout_byaction], collapse=","),
+                                ", some observations are censored before the outcome, check DAG(s) defining the action(s)")
 
   # * Combine all actions into one dataframe and convert to long format
   df_combine <- data.table::rbindlist(df_full, fill=TRUE)