Barten TRM, Staring CB, Hogan MC, Gevers TJG, Drenth JPH. Expanding the clinical application of the polycystic liver disease questionnaire: determination of a clinical threshold to select patients for therapy.
HPB (Oxford) 2023:S1365-182X(23)00120-X. [PMID:
37095030 DOI:
10.1016/j.hpb.2023.04.004]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/05/2022] [Revised: 03/04/2023] [Accepted: 04/10/2023] [Indexed: 04/26/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Polycystic liver disease (PLD) causes symptoms resulting from cystic volume expansion. The PLD-specific questionnaire (PLD-Q) captures symptom burden. This study aims to develop a threshold to identify patients with symptoms requiring further exploration and possibly intervention.
METHODS
We recruited PLD patients with completed PLD-Qs during their patient journey. We evaluated baseline PLD-Q scores in (un)treated PLD patients to determine a threshold of clinical importance. We assessed our threshold's discriminative ability with receiver operator characteristic statistics, Youden Index, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value parameters.
RESULTS
We included 198 patients with a balanced proportion of treated (n=100) and untreated patients (n=98, PLD-Q scores 49 vs 19, p<0.001; median total liver volume 5827 vs 2185 ml, p<0.001). We established the PLD-Q threshold at 32 points. A score of ≥32 differentiates treated from untreated patients with an area under the ROC of 0.856, Youden Index 0.564, sensitivity of 85.0%, specificity of 71.4%, positive predictive value of 75.2%, and negative predictive value of 82.4%. Similar metrics were observed in predefined subgroups and an external cohort.
CONCLUSION
We established the PLD-Q threshold at 32 points with high discriminative ability to identify symptomatic patients. Patients with a score ≥32 should be eligible for treatment or inclusion in trials.
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