Clustering the Clinical Course of Chronic Urticaria Using a Longitudinal Database: Effects on Urticaria Remission
Young‐Min Ye, Ji‐Won Yoon, Seong‐Dae Woo, Jae-Hyuk Jang, Young‐Soo Lee, Hyun Young Lee, Yoo Seob Shin, Dong‐Ho Nahm, Hae‐Sim Park
Abstract
PURPOSE: Little is known about the clinical course of chronic urticaria (CU) and predictors of its prognosis. We evaluated CU patient clusters based on medication scores during the initial 3 months of treatment in an attempt to investigate time to remission and relapse rates for CU and to identify predictors for CU remission. METHODS: In total, 4,552 patients (57.9% female; mean age of 38.6 years) with CU were included in this retrospective cohort study. The K-medoids algorithm was used for clustering CU patients. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis with Cox regression was applied to identify predictors of CU remission. RESULTS: < 0.001). Sensitization to house dust mites (HDMs; at least class 3) and female sex were identified as significant predictors of CU remission. Around 20% of patients who achieved CU remission experienced relapse. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we identified 4 CU patient clusters by analyzing medication scores during the first 3 months of treatment and found that sensitization to HDMs and female sex can affect CU prognosis. The use of immunomodulators was implicated in the risk for CU relapse.