Combining patient-reported outcome measures, including pain, general health, and quality of life scores, accurately detected active disease in up to 96% of psoriatic arthritis patients, according to a recent study.

The study evaluated the use of combined patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for detecting active disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA). The analysis included 683 RA patients from the Treatment in Rotterdam Early Arthritis Cohort (tREACH) and Tapering strategies in Rheumatoid Arthritis (TARA) trials and 525 PsA patients from the Dutch southwest Early Psoriatic Arthritis cohoRt (DEPAR), analyzing a total of 4,594 RA visits and 1,154 PsA visits. Active disease was defined as a shift from Disease Activity Score (DAS) ≤2.4 to DAS >2.4 in RA, and from Disease Activity Index for Psoriatic Arthritis (DAPSA) ≤14 to DAPSA >14 in PsA.

Key PROMs evaluated included general health (Visual Analogue Scale [VAS]), Health Assessment Questionnaire-Disability Index (HAQ-DI), EuroQol 5-Dimension (EQ-5D), pain (VAS/Numeric Rating Scale), fatigue, and presenteeism (productivity loss). The final model incorporated general health, HAQ-DI, EQ-5D, and pain, as these showed significant association with active disease. Active disease occurred in 8% of RA visits and 15% of PsA visits. The combined PROMs demonstrated acceptable discriminative ability for RA (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.76) and excellent performance for PsA (AUC = 0.85). A threshold of ≥1 deteriorated PROM showed 90% sensitivity and 40% specificity for RA and 96% sensitivity and 41% specificity for PsA.

These findings, published in RMD Open, suggest that a combination of general health, HAQ-DI, EQ-5D, and pain scores could serve as an effective screening tool for active disease in patients with RA and PsA, offering potential utility in remote monitoring and improving care efficiency. Full disclosures, including study grants from ZonMW, Pfizer, and AbbVie, can be found in the published study.