AMSTERDAM – The Lupus Low Disease Activity State measure of treatment response offers clinicians an attainable target for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus that correlates with a substantially reduced rate of organ damage, based on a retrospective assessment of data collected from more than 2,000 lupus patients at a single U.S. center.
The analysis showed that when patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) met the Lupus Low Disease Activity State (LLDAS) criteria at least half the time while on treatment, their overall rate of organ damage was reduced by 52%, compared with patients who never achieved LLDAS, Michelle A. Petri, MD, said at the European Congress of Rheumatology.
Mitchel L. Zoler/MDedge News
Dr. Michelle A. Petri
“LLDAS is something that anyone can use in practice,” and has the advantage of including a low steroid dose – no more than 7.5 mg prednisolone/day or an equivalent steroid – as one of its criteria, “a major bad actor” for SLE patients, Dr. Petri said in an interview. LLDAS “is absolutely ready for routine use,” although until now few clinicians have used it to monitor SLE patients, she noted.
“The LLDAS can be a useful target,” commented Ian N. Bruce, MD, professor of rheumatology at the University of Manchester (England), adding that the steroid dosage an SLE patient receives “is an important parameter to measure when assessing an SLE patient.
“It’s not far from being ready for routine use, but I’d like to see more evidence” that it’s a meaningful measure of an SLE patient’s disease status, he said in an interview.
To examine the clinical relevance of the LLDAS criteria, a five-point assessment for SLE first introduced in a 2016 report (Ann Rheum Dis. 2016 Sept;75[9]:1615-21), Dr. Petri and her associates applied it retrospectively to their records for 2,026 SLE patients in a Johns Hopkins registry. Clinicians at Johns Hopkins routinely assessed their SLE patients every 3 months and followed the patients for a median of about 10 years, and so had data from more than 81,000 patient encounters. The researchers used the longitudinal follow-up records to calculate an area under the curve for each patient that tracked their LLDAS state over time. This showed a clear dose-response relationship: The more time an SLE patient spent in LLDAS, the less organ damage they had. Patients who remained in LLDAS at least 75% of the time had a 60% reduction in cumulative organ damage, compared with patients who never achieved LLDAS, Dr. Petri said. The analysis also showed that LLDAS was substantially easier for patients to achieve than the Definitions of Remission in SLE (Ann Rheum Dis. 2017 March;76[3]:554-61). The Johns Hopkins cohort met the LLDAS definition about three times more often than they met the Definitions of Remission in SLE criteria, Dr. Petri said.
The new analysis also showed that LLDAS was especially effective in correlating with statistically significant reductions in future strokes, MI, and end-stage renal disease, though it did not significantly correlate with subsequent reductions in the incidence of cognitive impairment, deep vein thrombosis, malignancy, pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension, or cataract development. But the strong correlation of time in LLDAS and the future rate of stroke, MI, or end-stage renal disease was very meaningful because those are the most important types of damage associated with SLE, Dr. Petri said. “LLDAS is a good treatment target as a surrogate” for future risk of SLE complications.
The study had no commercial funding, and Dr. Petri had no disclosures to report. Dr. Bruce has been a consultant to and speaker for GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Pfizer, Roche, and UCB, and he has received research support from Genzyme, GlaxoSmithKline, Human Genome Sciences, Roche, and UCB.
SOURCE: Petri MA et al. Ann Rheum Dis. 2018;77(Suppl 2):111. Abstract OP0122.