As survival of SLE patients has improved significantly in the past decades, there have been an increase in organ damage accrual as a result of lupus flares, co-morbidity and treatments.
The objective was to assess the accumulated damage (AD) and determine the contribution of comorbidities to the damage score
A retrospective study was conducted on patients with a diagnosis of SLE (ACR 1997) included in the national registry of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus of the Argentine Society of Rheumatology (RELESSAR). Socio-demographic, clinical and therapeutic variables, the damage score at the last control (SLICC / SDI) and comorbidities were evaluated: diabetes, hypertension (HT), dyslipidemia, smoking, alcoholism and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
One thousand five hundred fifteen patients were included, 1390 women (91.7%), 685 (45.2%) mestizos, mean age at diagnosis 28.7 years, and 37.6 years at the last evaluation . The median SLE duration was 73.7 months; 47.5% did not present AD in the follow-up; 28.4% had score of 1. The most frequent damage was gonadal failure (9.43%). Patients with AD had a higher frequency of smoking, alcoholism, hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, COPD (p<0.05)
In the linear regression analysis, the variables that were significantly associated with AD were age (β 0.007), SLE duration (β 0.002), maximum doses of corticosteroids (β 0.519), the number of hospitalizations by SLE activity (β 0.178), COPD (β 0.324) and HT (β 0.275).
The damage score was influenced by the presence of comorbidities such as COPD and HT, in addition to others characteristics of SLE