Background: There is an unmet need to accurately assess disease activity and establish treatment goals for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Recently, the SLE Disease Activity Score (SLE-DAS) has been introduced and validated in Italian, Mexican and Indian populations [1]. Although SLE-DAS showed higher sensitivity than SLEDAI 2000 (SLEDAI-2K), little is known about the performance of this novel instrument in Chinese patients with SLE, especially those with high disease activity.

Objectives: We aimed to evaluate the validity of the SLE-DAS in Chinese population with SLE and determine the most appropriate tool for evaluating clinical changes.

Methods: We retrospectively studied 498 patients with SLE (fulfilling the classification criteria of ACR 1997 and/or SLICC 2012 and/or EULAR/ACR 2019) from Peking University First Hospital. Disease activity was quantified using Physician Global Assessment (PGA), SLEDAI-2K, and SLE-DAS. Demographic, clinical and laboratory parameters were also collected. To assess the performance of various instruments, we compared the correlations and agreements between SLE-DAS, PGA and SLEDAI-2K. We also we evaluated whether SLE-DAS was associated with serum complement levels.

Results: There were 68.9% patients with moderate to severe activity in our study. SLE-DAS score had a moderate positive correlation with PGA (r=0.729, p<0.001), and with SLEDAI-2K (r=0.783, p<0.001). SLE-DAS also showed a weak but evident association with C3 complement levels and with C4 complement levels. The total agreement between SLE-DAS and SLEDAI-2K was 84.3% (κ = 0.667).

Conclusion: SLE-DAS was a novel and useful tool to measure activity in SLE. However, the performance of SLE-DAS in our population was not robust, partly due to the high disease activity of enrolled patients. We need to evaluate the validity of the SLE-DAS separately in patients with different disease activity.

REFERENCES: [1] Jesus D, Matos A, Henriques C,et al. Derivation and validation of the SLE Disease Activity Score (SLE-DAS): a new SLE continuous measure with high sensitivity for changes in disease activity[J]. Ann Rheum Dis. 2019 Mar;78(3):365-371.

Acknowledgements: NIL.

Disclosure of Interests: None declared.

© The Authors 2025. This abstract is an open access article published in Annals of Rheumatic Diseases under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ). Neither EULAR nor the publisher make any representation as to the accuracy of the content. The authors are solely responsible for the content in their abstract including accuracy of the facts, statements, results, conclusion, citing resources etc.