Clinical efficacy of a method for identifying patients at high risk of carotid atherosclerosis in rheumatoid arthritis

Objective: to test the patented “Method for determining a high risk of atherosclerosis in rheumatoid arthritis” on patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
Materials and methods: 74 patients with RA who underwent inpatient treatment were examined. Gender composition of respondents: 77% women and 23% men. Mean age 54.1±9.1 years. The duration of RA is from 1 year to 26 years. 85.1% were diagnosed with a high degree of disease activity. Erosive arthritis was detected radiographically in 41 patients (55.4%). 83.7% (n=62) were seropositive for RF, 81% for ACCP (n=60). All received basic anti-inflammatory therapy. Systemic glucocorticoid therapy was received by 33.7%. All patients were calculated cardiovascular risk according to SCORЕ and mSCORЕ Also, all patients underwent duplex scanning of the BCA to detect atherosclerosis.
Results: no significant increase in traditional factors of cardiovascular diseases was found among patients. When CVR was stratified according to SCORE, the frequency of low risk was 32.4%, moderate — 59.5%, high — 5.4%, very high — 2.7%. When using mSCORE, low risk was found in 27%, moderate — 56.7%, high — 13.5%, very high — 2.7%. Atherosclerotic plaques (ASP) in the carotid arteries in patients stratified according to SCORE for moderate, high and very high risk was detected in 68%, in persons with similar risks according to mSCORE — in 66.7%. With a score of 4 or more when using the tested method, ASP was found in 77.8%. Sensitivity for the detection of ASP in the carotid arteries using SCORE was 0.77, with mSCORE and the tested method 0.81 and 0.95, respectively. Specificity 0.47, 0.4 and 0.6 respectively. Positive predictive power for SCORE — 0.68, mSCORE — 0.67, tested method — 0.77. Negative predictive power for SCORE — 0.58, mSCORE — 0.6, tested method — 0.9.
Conclusion: the study showed that our proposed method, which uses traditional clinical markers, significantly increases the sensitivity, specificity, and negative predictive power of calculation methods for identifying a group of individuals with a high risk of atherosclerotic lesions of extracranial arteries against the background of rheumatoid arthritis compared with using the SCORE and mSCORE parameters.

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