Clinical and associated inflammatory biomarker features predictive of short-term outcomes in non-systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

Objective: To identify early predictors of disease activity at 18 months in JIA using clinical and biomarker profiling.

Methods: Clinical and biomarker data were collected at JIA diagnosis in a prospective longitudinal inception cohort of 82 children with non-systemic JIA, and their ability to predict an active joint count of 0, a physician global assessment of disease activity of ≤1 cm, and inactive disease by Wallace 2004 criteria 18 months later was assessed. Correlation-based feature selection and ReliefF were used to shortlist predictors and random forest models were trained to predict outcomes.