LAUSR

The authors then separated each score into the risk categories ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’, a process which discards granular information and decreases estimation accuracy by hiding intra-category differences [2], but which, in this case, also improved the associations of the PADUA and SPARE scoring systems with the outcomes relative to the RENAL scoring system. Interestingly, with regard to these categories, SPARE seems more closely aligned with RENAL score (60%, 37% and 3% vs 51%, 44% and 5% in the low-, mediumand highrisk groups, respectively) than with PADUA (35%, 41% and 24%, respectively).