Disease Flares

SLICC PI: DR. DAVID ISENBERG

Funding Source: European League Against Rheumatism and American College of Rheumatology

Defining flare in patients with SLE is challenging. I have worked for many years to achieve the optimal way of doing this by 1) utilising a retrospective data analysis from the University College London Hospital lupus cohort, 2) a “live” patient studies involving rheumatologists from around the world and 3) a sbstantial case history analysis (with cases coming from all over the world).

Using the classic BILAG system, my colleagues and I showed that (1) in the course of a year approximately 10% of patients with lupus will have an ‘A’ flare; 50% will have one or more ‘B’ flares with about half each coming from a previous ‘C’ and ‘D’ and about 40% of patients in the course of a year will not flare.

In a study of 16 “live” SLE patients examined by a panel of 16 rheumatologists (2) the overall agreement between flare defined by BILAG 2004 and the SELENA Flare Index (SFI) was 81%. Intraclass correlation co-efficients were 0.54 (0.32 to 0.78), for BILAG 2004 compared with 0.21 (0.08 to 0.048) for the SELENA Flare Instrument and 0.16 (0.06 to 0.54) for the physician’s global assessment.

A more recent large-scale analysis of close to 1,000 patients has just been accepted for publication (3) and like the original study implies that distinguishing no activity from severe activity is not much of a problem but there are remaining issues distinguishing severe and moderate disease and mild disease and moderate disease.