An Iranian Scoring System for Diagnosing Buerger's Disease

Abstract

Buerger's disease or thromboangiitis obliterans (TAO) seems to be common in IR Iran, The present study aimed to evaluate an Iranian population with Buerger's disease in order to suggest a diagnostic criterion for Buerger's disease based on the most frequent findings and to compare it with Papa diagnostic criteria. In a cross-sectional study, all patients with resting limb pain, limb ischemic ulcers, intermittent claudication and limb ischemia who referred to the Vascular Clinic of Sina Hospital during 2009-2011 were evaluated. The patients were allocated to Buerger's and non-Buerger's groups; Evaluating 122 patients (61 in each group), according to the model each clinical manifestations and risk factors in the patients with Buerger's disease obtained a score. Absent pulsation, abnormal distal Doppler sonography and ischemic ulcer were respectively present in 58 (95.1%), 58 (95.1%) and 49 (80.3%) individuals with Buerger's disease. Multivariate linear regression analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used for modeling. Considering the model finding findings, diagnostic criteria including age, sex, smoking, Raynaud's phenomenon, abnormal proximal Doppler, diabetes mellitus and hyperlipidemia were suggested (R2=0.582); the sensitivity and specificity of the criteria was respectively 95.1% and 78.7%. Compared with Papa criteria, Kappa coefficient was measured at 0.66 with a P-value<0.001. It seems that the recommended criteria have an acceptable accuracy in diagnosing Buerger's disease, especially in the Iranian population; however, it is necessary to conduct more studies with larger sample sizes to evaluate the criteria, especially in other populations.