A machine learning-assisted model for renal urate underexcretion with genetic and clinical variables among Chinese men with gout.

OBJECTIVES

The objective of this study was to develop and validate a prediction model for renal urate underexcretion (RUE) in male gout patients.

METHODS

Men with gout enrolled from multicenter cohorts in China were analyzed as the development and validation data sets. The RUE phenotype was defined as fractional excretion of uric acid (FEUA) <5.5%. Candidate genetic and clinical features were screened by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) with 10-fold cross-validation. Machine learning algorithms (stochastic gradient descent (SGD), logistic regression, support vector machine) were performed to construct a predictive classifier of RUE. Models were assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the precision-recall curve (PRC).

RESULTS

One thousand two hundred thirty-eight and two thousand twenty-three patients were enrolled as the development and validation cohorts, with 1220 and 754 randomly chosen patients genotyped, respectively. Rs3775948.GG of SLC2A9/GLUT9, rs504915.AA of NRXN2/URAT1, and 7 clinical features (age, hypertension, nephrolithiasis, blood glucose, serum urate, urea nitrogen, and creatinine) were generated by LASSO. Two additional SNP variants (rs2231142.GG of ABCG2 and rs11231463.GG of SLC22A9/OAT7) were selected based on their contributions to gout in the development cohort and their reported effects on renal urate handling. The optimized classifiers yielded AUCs of ~0.914 and PRCs of ~0.980 using these 11 variables. The SGD model was conducted in the validation cohort with an AUC of 0.899 and the PRC of 0.957.

CONCLUSIONS

A prediction model for RUE composed of four SNPs and readily accessible clinical features was established with acceptable accuracy for men with gout.