Does kidney biopsy in pediatric lupus patients “complement” the management and outcomes of silent lupus nephritis? Lessons learned from a pediatric cohort

Background Silent lupus nephritis (SLN) is systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) without clinical and laboratory features of kidney involvement but with biopsy-proven nephritis. This study aims to describe and compare the baseline characteristics and outcomes of pediatric SLN with overt LN (OLN) and to identify associated risk factors and biochemical markers. Methods In this retrospective, observational study, multivariate logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses studied age, sex, race, serum complements, anti-double-stranded-DNA antibody, anti-Smith antibody, eGFR, and proliferative nephritis. Results In our cohort of 69 patients, 47 were OLN, and 22 were SLN. OLN ( OR = 4.9, p = 0.03) and non-African Americans (AA) ( OR = 13.0, p < 0.01) had higher odds, and increasing C3 and C4 were associated with lower odds of proliferative nephritis ( OR 0.95 and 0.65 per one unit increase in C3 and C4, respectively, p < 0.01). They demonstrated a good discriminative ability to detect proliferative nephritis as assessed by the area under the ROC curve (C3 = 0.78, C4 = 0.78). C3 and C4 in proliferative SLN and OLN were comparable and significantly lower than their non-proliferative counterparts. No association was observed between age, sex, anti-double-stranded-DNA antibody, anti-Smith antibody, eGFR, and proliferative nephritis. Proliferative SLN and OLN patients received similar treatments. Adverse events were identified in the proliferative OLN only. Conclusions Lower complement levels are associated with proliferative lesions in pediatric LN—both SLN and OLN. The non-AA population had higher odds of having proliferative nephritis than the AA. Prospective, randomized, long-term follow-up of proliferative SLN patients is needed to ascertain the beneficial effect of early diagnosis and treatment. Graphical abstract A higher resolution version of the Graphical abstract is available as Supplementary information Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00467-022-05859-w.