Page 28 - SPONDYLOARTHRITIS IN COLOMBIA -

ASAS-criteria have not been applied in a South-American population. By default, classification criteria in clinical practice should be applied to patients that have been diagnosed by the rheumatologist; they are not diagnostic criteria. Consequently, they should be tested against the clinical judgment of the rheumatologist. Because of the nature of classification criteria, it can be expected that sensitivity is relatively low, but if performing well, specificity should be high 5.
The main objectives of this study are twofold: first, to test how the ASAS-criteria perform in the context of the clinical Colombian rheumatology setting in comparison to other criteria sets. Second, to provide a general insight about how rheumatologists follow the diagnostic path in a patient suspected of having SpA. The cohort was established before the development and implementation of ASAS-criteria; therefore, the participating rheumatologists were unlikely to be biased with respect to the application of these criteria.
METHODS
Patients
Consecutive patients were included between January-2002 and June-2010 in a single-centre study of patients referred to a specialised rheumatology outpatient clinic in a national referral centre. Patients with a clinical diagnosis of SpA (defined as the “reference standard”) by one of two rheumatologists who were considered experts in the field (RV and JL), were selected and included in the study on the first visit to the clinic. The inclusion of the patients was based on the clinical diagnosis and not on any set of classification criteria. Then, this cohort of patients based on SpA clinical diagnoses by the rheumatologist, was further analysed for the characteristics included in the ASAS, ESSG and Amor-criteria. Patient information was based on the information from the clinical record. The institutional ethics committee approved this study, which was conducted under
26