Clinical risk stratification: Development and validation of the DAAE score, a tool for estimating patient risk of...

Because secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS) is associated with worse prognosis, early predictive tools are needed. We aimed to use systematic literature review and advanced methods to create and validate a clinical tool for estimating individual patient risk of transition to SPMS over five years.

Data from the Jacobs Multiple Sclerosis Center (JMSC) and the Multiple Sclerosis Center Amsterdam (MSCA) was collected between 1994 and 2022. Participants were relapsing-remitting adult patients at initial evaluation. We created the tool in four stages: (1) identification of candidate predictors from systematic literature review, (2) ordinal cutoff determination, (3) feature selection, (4) feature weighting.

Patients in the development/internal-validation/external-validation datasets respectively (n = 787/n = 522/n = 877) had a median age of 44.1/42.4/36.6 and disease duration of 7.7/6.2/4.4 years. From these, 12.6 %/10.2 %/15.4 % converted to SPMS (median=4.9/5.2/5.0 years). The DAAE Score was named from included predictors: Disease duration, Age at disease onset, Age, EDSS. It ranges from 0 to 12 points, with risk groups of very-low=0-2, low=3-7, medium=8-9, and high≥10. Risk of transition to SPMS increased proportionally across these groups in development (2.7 %/7.4 %/18.8 %/40.2 %), internal-validation (2.9 %/6.8 %/26.8 %/36.5 %), and external-validation (7.5 %/9.6 %/22.4 %/37.5 %).

The DAAE Score estimates individual patient risk of transition to SPMS consistently across datasets internationally using clinically-accessible data. With further validation, this tool could be used for clinical risk estimation.