Juvenile dermatomyositis (JDM) is a rare disease in children that is treatable, but patients may suffer from long-term effects. Clinical trials are needed to find better treatments for affected patients. Among validated tools for evaluating disease activity clinically is the Disease Activity Score (DAS), but it is not routinely collected in all clinics. We developed a modified DAS (DASmod), which can be scored using data routinely collected by our clinical staff and has been used in previous studies. The aim of this study was to determine if our DASmod correlates with the validated DAS in patients with JDM.
Methods. In this study, we used DASmod (scored 0–12) and DAS (scored 0–20) scores for patients with JDM in our clinic. We analyzed the correlation between the DASmod and the validated DAS.
Results. For 51 patients seen in our JDM clinic, the median (IQR) DASmod score was 2.0 (0–4.0) and the DAS score was 3.0 (0–5.5). Scores on the 2 tools were highly positively correlated (r = 0.94, P < 0.001, 95% CI 0.89–0.96). The linear regression was significant [R2 = 0.88, F (1, 49) = 357.60, P < 0.001] and in this dataset, the tools can be used interchangeably with the regression equation: DAS score = –0.26 + 1.5*DAS.
Reference link- https://www.jrheum.org/content/48/1/101
