FRI0018 USING SELF-REPORTED OUTCOMES TO DETECT NEW-ONSET FLARE IN A REAL-WORLD STUDY OF PARTICIPANTS WITH RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS - INTERIM RESULTS FROM THE DIGITAL TRACKING OF ARTHRITIS LONGITUDINALLY (DIGITAL) STUDY

Abstract

Background:Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) experience fluctuating symptoms, increased pain, decreased function and variable quality of life; such changes often occur between visits to clinicians. Digital Tracking of Arthritis Longitudinally (DIGITAL) study2is evaluating the use of electronically captured patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) and passive data collection from a Fitbit device to identify disease worsening in a real-world study of participants (pts) with RA.Objectives:Evaluate agreement between self-reported new-onset flare and ePROs in an interim analysis from DIGITAL using a classification model.Methods:Members of the ArthritisPower registry with RA were invited to participate in DIGITAL. Pts who successfully completed a two-week Lead-in period entered the Main Study in which they wore a smartwatch and provided daily (pain and fatigue numeric rating scales (NRS)) and weekly ePROs, including the OMERACT RA Flare Questionnaire (FLARE) and PROMIS measures. This interim analysis is of ePRO data from pts who completed at least 30 days of the Main Study. A “Yes” response to the FLARE item, “Are you having a flare now?” identified flare. For modeling association between new-onset flare and ePRO, the dataset was split into training (the first 30 days of the Main Study) and test data (Day 31 and following). Within each dataset, repeated binary outcomes (Flare/No Flare) per pt were defined each week. To focus on new-onset flare, within each dataset, outcomes for patient weeks for which flare was present in the previous week were excluded.Candidate variables for the model included baseline and current FLARE score (0-50 scale) and each of its 5 items, daily pain, daily fatigue, and several PROMIS weekly instruments and their lagged values (last week or last 6 days for daily). ‘Baseline’ was calculated in non-flare weeks. Training data was used for logistic regression model selection combining clinical expertise with backward elimination. Performance of the final model was evaluated using test data.Results:The training data was composed of outcomes from 128 pts who reported 388 weekly flare assessments as no flare or onset flare over 2800 days during the first month of the Main Study. Of pts in the training dataset, 92.2% were female, 87.5% white, with mean age (SD) 52.7 (11.0) and years since RA diagnosis 10.4 (10.3); 62.5% were on a biologic. Among those in the training dataset, 58 flare outcomes occurred in 50 (39.1%) unique pts.The test data comprised outcomes from 123 pts who reported 442 weekly flare assessments as no flare or onset flare over 3366 days in which 64 flare outcomes occurred, and primarily included continued observations from pts who contributed to the training dataset.The best-performing model to classify flare in training data included the current and baseline FLARE instrument activity question (i.e. “Considering how active your rheumatoid arthritis has been, how much difficulty have you had when taking part in activities such as work, family life, social events that are typical for you during the last week”), current daily pain, and baseline daily pain average and standard deviation. In test data, this model had an area under the receiver operator curve of 0.81 (Figure). At a cut point requiring specificity to be ≥0.80, sensitivity to detect flare was 0.62 and overall accuracy was 0.78.Conclusion:New-onset flare is common among RA patients, and the FLARE instrument and daily pain scores appear effective to classify it. Evaluation of passive data as a proxy for self-reported new-onset flare is ongoing.