Develop and validate a novel online AIHI-nomogram to predict severe liver inflammation in patients with autoimmune hepatitis.

INTRODUCTION AND

OBJECTIVES

Assessment of liver inflammation plays a vital role in the management of patients with autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). We aimed to establish and validate a nomogram to predict severe liver inflammation in AIH patients.

PATIENTS AND

METHODS

AIH patients who underwent liver biopsy were included and randomly divided into a training set and a validation set. Independent predictors of severe liver inflammation were selected by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression from the training set and used to conduct a nomogram. Receiver characteristic curves (ROC), calibration curves, and decision curve analysis (DCA) were adopted to evaluate the performance of nomogram.

RESULTS

Of the 213 patients, female patients accounted for 83.1% and the median age was 53.0 years. The albumin, gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase, total bilirubin, red cell distribution width, prothrombin time, and platelets were independent predictors of severe inflammation. An online AIHI-nomogram was established and was available at https://ndth-zzy.shinyapps.io/AIHI-nomogram/. The calibration curve revealed that the AIHI-nomogram had a good agreement with actual observation in the training and validation sets. The area under the ROCs of AIHI-nomogram were 0.795 in the training set and 0.759 in the validation set, showing significantly better performance than alanine aminotransferase and immunoglobulin G in the training and validation sets, as well in AIH patients with normal ALT in the training set. DCA indicated that the AIHI-nomogram was clinically useful.

CONCLUSIONS

This novel AIHI-nomogram provided an excellent prediction of severe liver inflammation in AIH patients and could be used for the better management of AIH.