MBDA: what is it good for?

We read with interest the paper by Hambardzumyan et al 1 studying the predictive value of multibiomarker disease activity (MBDA) score in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for radiographic progression (RP) using the SWEFOT study data. In review, the SWEFOT trial enrolled individuals who had active RA with average DAS28 scores of above 52; 235 subjects in the SWEFOT trial were included in the current analysis. The authors state that when MBDA score at baseline was low (n=5) or moderate (n=29), only one patient had RP, defined as an increase by more than 5 points in the Van der Heijde-modified Sharp score (SHS) over 1 year. When baseline MBDA score was high, 42 out of 201 patients (21%) had a 5-points worsening of SHS at 1 year. While the specificity and positive predictive value of MBDA to predict RP were …