Development and Validation of a Lifetime Risk Model for Kidney Failure and Treatment Benefit in Type 2 Diabetes: 10-Year and Lifetime Risk Prediction Models

Abstract

Background and objectives: Individuals with type 2 diabetes are at a higher risk of developing kidney failure. The objective of this study was to develop and validate a decision support tool for estimating 10-year and lifetime risks of kidney failure in individuals with type 2 diabetes as well as estimating individual treatment effects of preventive medication.

Design, setting, participants, & measurements: The prediction algorithm was developed in 707,077 individuals with prevalent and incident type 2 diabetes from the Swedish National Diabetes Register for 2002-2019. Two Cox proportional regression functions for kidney failure (first occurrence of kidney transplantation, long-term dialysis, or persistent eGFR <15 ml/min per 1.73 m²) and all-cause mortality as respective end points were developed using routinely available predictors. These functions were combined into life tables to calculate the predicted survival without kidney failure while using all-cause mortality as the competing outcome. The model was externally validated in 256,265 individuals with incident type 2 diabetes from the Scottish Care Information Diabetes database between 2004 and 2019.

Results: During a median follow-up of 6.8 years (interquartile range, 3.2-10.6), 8004 (1%) individuals with type 2 diabetes in the Swedish National Diabetes Register cohort developed kidney failure, and 202,078 (29%) died. The model performed well, with c statistics for kidney failure of 0.89 (95% confidence interval, 0.88 to 0.90) for internal validation and 0.74 (95% confidence interval, 0.73 to 0.76) for external validation. Calibration plots showed good agreement in observed versus predicted 10-year risk of kidney failure for both internal and external validation.

Conclusions: This study derived and externally validated a prediction tool for estimating 10-year and lifetime risks of kidney failure as well as life years free of kidney failure gained with preventive treatment in individuals with type 2 diabetes using easily available clinical predictors.

Podcast: This article contains a podcast at https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.asn-online.org/media/podcast/CJASN/2022_11_04_CJN05020422.mp3.

Keywords: diabetes mellitus; end stage kidney disease; epidemiology and outcomes; risk factors.