MELBOURNE – Vascular involvement in patients with lupus nephritis is associated with poorer outcomes and could be a trigger for a more aggressive treatment approach, according to observational study results reported at an international congress on systemic lupus erythematosus.
Manish Rathi, MD, a nephrologist at the Postgraduate Institution of Medical Education & Research in Chandigarh, India, reported the results of a 5-year prospective cohort study in 241 patients with biopsy-proven lupus nephritis.
Bianca Nogrady/Frontline Medical News
Dr. Manish Rathi
Researchers found that patients with vascular involvement had significantly higher serum creatinine at baseline than did those without it. At follow-up, they also had significantly higher proteinuria and serum creatinine, as well as significantly lower serum albumin.
This group was also less likely to achieve complete remission, compared with patients without vascular involvement (38.2% vs. 61.9%; P = .006), and had treatment-refractory disease almost twice as often (26.3% vs. 14.3%; P = .02).
Overall, vascular involvement was seen in 32.3% of patients, with the most common form being arteriosclerosis (22.8%), followed by vascular thrombotic microangiopathy (11.2%), asymptomatic vascular immune deposits (5.3%), vasculopathy (2%), and vasculitis (0.8%).
Three-quarters of all patients had nephrotic syndrome, and 41.9% were identified as Class IV, 18.7% as Class V, 10.4% as Class III, and 3.7% as Class II.
When researchers examined the presentation and outcomes among these subgroups, they found that patients with vascular thrombotic microangiopathy had a significantly higher serum creatinine and were less likely to respond to treatment, compared with patients without vascular thrombotic microangiopathy (60% vs. 79.1%).
Similarly, patients with arteriosclerosis had significantly lower incidence of complete remission, compared with those without arteriosclerosis (37.7% vs. 58.8%) although they had significantly higher rates of partial remission (35.8% vs. 19.4%).
“Lupus patients, if they had involvement of vascular compartment, they had more severe presentation at the time of presentation as well as poorer outcomes despite giving the standard therapy,” Dr. Rathi said.
In an interview, Dr. Rathi said the results had already influenced their own treatment approach with these patients.
“What we have started doing now is – if there is vascular involvement, particularly the thrombotic microangiopathy – we treat them as severe lupus nephritis [patients], so even if their class of lupus nephritis is less severe, we’ll be treating them as severe,” he said.
Commenting on the presentation, Frederic Houssiau, MD, PhD, a professor of rheumatology at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels, said he agreed that vascular involvement was neglected in the current classification of lupus nephritis and that it should be taken into account.
“Maybe we should not only consider the class but also look in more detail to the pathophysiological findings,” Dr. Houssiau said in an interview. “When you have a lot of inflammation in the vessels, for instance, maybe we should use cyclophosphamide.”
No conflicts of interest were disclosed.