Improvement with time of vascular outcomes in systemic sclerosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis study

Vascular disease in SSc is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Preliminary data may lead to the suggestion of a modifiable unified-vascular endophenotype. Our aim was to determine whether the prevalence, mortality and severity of SSc-vascular disease have changed over time.

We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature in PubMed 1950-2019 related to SSc-digital ulcers (DUs), pulmonary artery hypertension (PAH) and scleroderma renal crisis (SRC). We included full-text articles and extracted study characteristics and assessed risk of bias/quality. We examined the prevalence, mortality and surrogate measures of SSc-associated vascular disease severity.

We included 55 studies in our meta-analysis. The pooled prevalence of DUs (41.0%), PAH (9.5%) and SRC (4.9%) remained largely stable over time. There was significant improvement in PAH 1-year (P = 0.001) and SRC mortality (P < 0.001), but not PAH 3-year (P = 0.312) or 5-year (P = 0.686) mortality. The prevalence of DU healing did not significantly change (P = 0.265). There was a trend (all P = ∼0.1) towards improvement in PAH surrogates: mean pulmonary artery pressure, pulmonary vascular resistance and right atrial pressure. For SRC, there was evidence that the overall frequency of dialysis (66.7%, P = 0.297) and permanent dialysis (35.4%, P = 0.036) increased over time.

Despite the heterogeneity and scarcity of the disease, there have been major improvements obtained in the various vascular complications in SSc leading to benefit in survival. This is supported by a trend towards improvement in several surrogate markers and demonstrates that progress in vascular management translates into major patient benefit.