Touma Z, Cervera R, Brinks R, et al. - In the international early SLE cohort of 389 persons who were diagnosed within the last 3 years, experts assessed the interrelationship between candidate criteria items in an international early SLE cohort and in the Euro-Lupus cohort. Data on ACR 1997, SLICC 2012 and 30 additional items were obtained. It was discovered that some of the candidate SLE criteria do assemble within domains. Provided these interrelationships, various criteria within a domain should not be irrespectively counted. Thus, for the structure of new SLE classification criteria, these results are significant.