A nomogram to predict the risk of proliferative lupus nephritis in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus involving the kidneys

Proliferative lupus nephritis (PLN) is a serious organ-threatening manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) that is associated with high mortality and renal failure. Here, we analyzed data from 1287 SLE patients with renal manifestations, including 780 of which were confirmed as proliferative or non-proliferative LN patients by renal biopsy, divided into a training cohort (547 patients) and a validation cohort (233 patients). By applying a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression approach combined with multivariate logistic regression analysis to build a nomogram for prediction of PLN that was then assessed by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, calibration curves, and clinical decision curves (DCA) in both the training and validation cohorts. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the model in the training cohort was 0.921 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.895–0.946), the AUC of internal validation in the training cohort was 0.909 and the AUC of external validation was 0.848 (95% CI: 0.796–0.900). The nomogram showed good performance as evaluated using calibration and DCA curves. Taken together, our results indicate that our nomogram that comprises 12 significantly relevant variables could be clinically valuable to prognosticate on the risk of PLN in SLE, so as to improve patient prognoses.