Development and validation of a haematuria cancer risk score to identify patients at risk of harbouring cancer

BACKGROUND A lack of consensus exists amongst national guidelines regarding who should be investigated for haematuria. Type of haematuria and age-specific thresholds are frequently used to guide referral for the investigation of haematuria. OBJECTIVES To develop and externally validate the haematuria cancer risk score (HCRS) to improve patient selection for the investigation of haematuria. METHODS Development cohort comprise of 3539 prospectively recruited patients recruited at 40 UK hospitals (DETECT 1; ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02676180) and validation cohort comprise of 656 Swiss patients. All patients were aged >18 years and referred to hospital for the evaluation of visible and nonvisible haematuria. Sensitivity and specificity of the HCRS in the validation cohort were derived from a cut-off identified from the discovery cohort. RESULTS Patient age, gender, type of haematuria and smoking history were used to develop the HCRS. HCRS validation achieves good discrimination (AUC 0.835; 95% CI: 0.789-0.880) and calibration (calibration slope = 1.215) with no significant overfitting (P = 0.151). The HCRS detected 11.4% (n = 8) more cancers which would be missed by UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines. The American Urological Association guidelines would identify all cancers with a specificity of 12.6% compared to 30.5% achieved by the HCRS. All patients with upper tract cancers would have been identified. CONCLUSION The HCRS offers good discriminatory accuracy which is superior to existing guidelines. The simplicity of the model would facilitate adoption and improve patient and physician decision-making.