Welcome to Risk Assessment Calculator

Medicines such as methotrexate that suppress the immune system are used to treat inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, skin psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease. However, these medicines can affect the blood count, and liver and kidney function, especially in the first few months of treatment, and, fortnightly to monthly blood tests are undertaken to detect them early. These side-effects are less common after a year of treatment. Despite this, all patients taking these medicines are required to undergo blood tests approximately three monthly. It is unclear if frequent blood tests are needed for everyone. Funded by the National Institute of Health and Care Research, we set out to find the best strategy to screen for these side-effects during established treatment.

We developed five different calculators to predict the risk of these side-effects during long-term treatment with five most used immune-suppressing medicines. We used anonymous information from day-to-day treatment of patients in the UK. Our risk calculations performed well at predicting the side-effects. You can find more details about how we developed the risk calculators in the pages where the calculators are.

We interviewed people with inflammatory conditions and health professionals to explore their experience of what happens now and what might be a better approach. Increasing the interval between monitoring blood-tests was acceptable to patients and health professionals. You can read about this study here.

This website hosts all the five calculators. As of now we are working with experts to find out how to use the scores from the calculators to inform the interval between blood-tests. These calculators should not be used for patient care.