Abstract
This study is based on the consideration that the patients with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis undergoing biological therapy have a higher risk of developing tuberculosis. The QuantiFERON-TB Gold test result was the output of the models and a series of features related to the patients and their treatments were chosen as inputs. A distribution of patients by gender and biological therapy, followed at the time of inclusion in the study, and at the end of the study, is made for both rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. A series of classification algorithms (random forest, nearest neighbor, k-nearest neighbors, C4.5 decision trees, non-nested generalized exemplars, and support vector machines) and attribute selection algorithms (ReliefF, InfoGain, and correlation-based feature selection) were successfully applied. Useful information was obtained regarding the influence of biological and classical treatments on tuberculosis risk, and most of them agreed with medical studies.
Highlights
It is known that the patients with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis undergoing biological therapy have a higher risk of developing tuberculosis (TB)
We aimed to establish the factors that influenced the reactivation of tuberculosis, taking into account both elements related to the patient and the treatment they followed in order to determine which of them were relevant for our problem
The relevant factors for our problem were selected from elements regarding the patient and the treatment, with the difference being that the medical history was not taken into consideration for these patients, and that the concomitant treatment was with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and not DMARDs and corticosteroids
Summary
It is known that the patients with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis undergoing biological therapy have a higher risk of developing tuberculosis (TB). This is the reason why the diagnosis and treatment of latent tuberculosis infections (LTBI) in these patients are very important. A study conducted in Korea aimed to estimate the risk of TB development among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients receiving biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) or a Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor. Another study [2] included 38,702 patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS), other types of spondyloarthritis (SpA), and psoriatic arthritis (PsA), and 200,417 persons from the general population. The stconcluded that biological-naive patients do not have an increased TB risk, but the risk increases for the patients following the treatment with biological agents
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