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To establish a set of clinical and paraclinical criteria potentially useful as a diagnostic screening tool for polyarteritis nodosa (PAN).

The abilities of individual descriptive items to predict a diagnosis of PAN were evaluated by screening available data from 949 patients from the French Vasculitis Study Group database, including 262 with PAN and 687 with control vasculitides. Selected items were tested in a logistic regression model to establish a minimal set of nonredundant PAN‐predictive criteria. The discriminative accuracy of these items and of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 1990 criteria were assessed by reapplying them to the initial patient sample and a subgroup restricted to PAN and microscopic polyangiitis (MPA) patients. A computer simulation procedure was conducted on artificially generated patient data to evaluate the usefulness of these criteria in predicting a …