A machine learning-assisted model for renal urate underexcretion with genetic and clinical variables among Chinese men with gout

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to develop and validate a prediction model for renal urate underexcretion (RUE) in male gout patients. METHODS: Men with gout enrolled from multicenter cohorts in China were analyzed as the development and validation data sets. The RUE phenotype was defined as fractional excretion of uric acid (FE(UA)) <5.5%. Candidate genetic and clinical features were screened by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) with 10-fold cross-validation. Machine learning algorithms (stochastic gradient descent (SGD), logistic regression, support vector machine) were performed to construct a predictive classifier of RUE. Models were assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the precision-recall curve (PRC). RESULTS: One thousand two hundred thirty-eight and two thousand twenty-three patients were enrolled as the development and validation cohorts, with 1220 and 754 randomly chosen patients genotyped, respectively. Rs3775948.GG of SLC2A9/GLUT9, rs504915.AA of NRXN2/URAT1, and 7 clinical features (age, hypertension, nephrolithiasis, blood glucose, serum urate, urea nitrogen, and creatinine) were generated by LASSO. Two additional SNP variants (rs2231142.GG of ABCG2 and rs11231463.GG of SLC22A9/OAT7) were selected based on their contributions to gout in the development cohort and their reported effects on renal urate handling. The optimized classifiers yielded AUCs of ~0.914 and PRCs of ~0.980 using these 11 variables. The SGD model was conducted in the validation cohort with an AUC of 0.899 and the PRC of 0.957. CONCLUSIONS: A prediction model for RUE composed of four SNPs and readily accessible clinical features was established with acceptable accuracy for men with gout. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13075-022-02755-4.