Young-Min Ye

and 8 more

Background: Little is known about the clinical course of chronic urticaria (CU) and predictors of its prognosis. We evaluated CU patient clusters based on medication scores for the initial 3 months of treatment to investigate time to remission and relapse rates and to identify predictors for CU remission. Methods: In total, 4552 patients (57.9% female; mean age of 38.6 years) with CU were included in this retrospective cohort study. The K-medoids algorithm was used for clustering CU patients. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis with Cox regression was applied to identify predictors of CU remission. Results: Four distinct clusters were identified: patients with consistently low disease activity (cluster 1, n = 1786), with medium-to-low disease activity (cluster 2, n = 1031), with consistently medium disease activity (cluster 3, n = 1332), or with consistently high disease activity (cluster 4, n = 403). Mean age, treatment duration, peripheral neutrophil counts, total IgE, and complements levels were significantly higher for cluster 4 than the other three clusters. Median times to remission were also different among the four clusters (2.1 vs 3.3 vs 6.4 vs 9.4 years, respectively, P < .001). Sensitization to house dust mites (≥ class 3) and female sex were identified as significant predictors of CU remission. Around 20% of patients who achieved CU remission experienced relapse. Conclusion: In this study, we identified four CU patient clusters by analyzing medication scores during the first 3 months of treatment and found that sensitization to house dust mites and female sex can affect CU prognosis.