Pulmonary Sarcoidosis: Prognostic Factors at Diagnosis in Patients from North of Portugal.

Abstract

Sarcoidosis is a multisystemic granulomatous disease that affects the lungs in more than 90% of the patients. It is associated with a variable clinical course and considering all the different forms of disease presentation, there are an absence of reliable clinical prognostic markers that can predict the outcome at diagnosis. The aim of our study was to investigate prognostic factors at diagnosis in a population of sarcoidosis patients from Northern Portugal. A group of 110 patients with chronic evolution was compared with 129 patients with disease resolution regarding their clinical, radiologic and laboratorial features. We found a positive association between the chronic forms and lung function impairment, radiologic stage II, lower lymphocyte CD4/CD8 and extrapulmonary disease. Löfgren syndrome and asthenia instead had a protective significant association to chronicity. Our final logistic regression model found a significant independent association between age (adjusted OR=1.06), extrapulmonary involvement (adjusted OR=2.68), Löfgren's syndrome (adjusted OR=0.15) with outcome toward chronicity. In this first study searching for prognostic factors at diagnosis in a Northern Portuguese population, we found clinical prognosis factors that have been described in other populations that should be considered whenever sarcoidosis is identified.