Application of clinical decision support tools for predicting outcomes with vedolizumab therapy in patients with...

We aimed to validate clinical decision support tools (CDSTs) to predict real-life effectiveness of vedolizumab (VDZ) in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

We retrospectively enrolled patients with Crohn's disease (CD) or ulcerative colitis (UC) treated with VDZ at 10 tertiary referral centres in Korea between January 2017 and November 2021. We assessed clinical remission (CREM) and response (CRES), corticosteroid-free clinical remission (CSF-CREM) and response (CSF-CRES), biochemical response based on C-reactive protein (BioRES[CRP]) and faecal calprotectin (BioRES[FC]), endoscopic healing (EH), and the need to optimise or switch drugs based on CDST-defined response groups. Additionally, the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) for the CDSTs was calculated.

We included 143 patients with CD and 219 with UC. We observed incremental trends on CSF-CRES at week 14 (W14) (p_trend = 0.004) and decreasing trends for the need to optimise or switch drugs (p_trend = 0.016) in CD from the low to high probability groups. Except for CSF-CREM at W54, we noticed incremental trends for all clinical responses at W14, W26 and W54 (p_trend <0.001) in UC. W26 and W54 BioRES[CRP] and W14 EH also showed increasing trends (p_trend <0.05) in UC. With increasing probabilities of response, drug optimisation or switching was less frequently required in UC (p_trend = 0.013). With 26 points cut-off, CDSTs effectively identified W14 CSF-CRES, W26 BioRES[CRP], BioRES[FC] and W54 BioRES[CRP] in UC, all with AUCs >0.600, whereas CDSTs showed poor accuracy in CD.

CDSTs for VDZ had acceptable accuracy in predicting effectiveness outcomes including clinical and biochemical outcomes in UC. However, their utility in CD was limited.