A Comparison of 2019 EULAR/ACR SLE Classification Criteria with Two Sets of Earlier SLE Classification Criteria.

Publication Date

2020

Journal Title

Arthritis Care Res

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:The Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics (SLICC) 2012 SLE classification criteria and the revised American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 1997 criteria are list-based, counting each SLE manifestation equally. We derived a classification rule based on giving variable weights to the SLICC criteria, and compared its performance to the revised ACR 1997, unweighted SLICC 2012 and the newly reported European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR)/ACR 2019 criteria. METHODS:The physician-rated patient scenarios used to develop the SLICC 2012 classification criteria were re-employed to devise a new weighted classification rule using multiple linear regression. The performance of the rule was evaluated on an independent set of expert-diagnosed patient scenarios and compared to the performance of the previously reported classification rules. RESULTS:Weighted SLICC criteria and the EULAR/ACR 2019 criteria had less sensitivity but better specificity compared to the list-based revised ACR 1997 and SLICC 2012 classification criteria. There were no statistically significant differences between any pair of rules with respect to overall agreement with the physician diagnosis. CONCLUSION:The two new weighted classification rules did not perform better than the existing list-based rules in terms of overall agreement on a dataset originally generated to assess the SLICC criteria. Given the added complexity of summing weights, researchers may prefer the unweighted SLICC criteria. However, the performance of a classification rule will always depend on the populations from which the cases and non-cases are derived, and whether the goal is to prioritize sensitivity or specificity.

Document Type

Article

Status

Faculty

Facility

School of Medicine

Primary Department

Molecular Medicine

Additional Departments

General Internal Medicine

PMID

32433832

DOI

10.1002/acr.24263

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