The most commonly used disease severity scores are inappropriate for risk stratification of older emergency department sepsis patients: an observational multi-centre study

摘要

Background Sepsis recognition in older emergency department (ED) patients is difficult due to atypical symptom presentation. We therefore investigated whether the prognostic and discriminative performance of the five most commonly used disease severity scores were appropriate for risk stratification of older ED sepsis patients (≥70?years) compared to a younger control group ( Methods This was an observational multi-centre study using an existing database in which ED patients who were hospitalized with a suspected infection were prospectively included. Patients were stratified by age Results In-hospital mortality was 9.5% ((95%-CI); 7.4–11.5) in the 783 included older patients, and 4.6% (3.6–5.7) in the 1497 included younger patients. In contrast to younger patients, disease severity scores in older patients associated poorly with mortality. The AUCs of all disease severity scores were poor and ranged from 0.56 to 0.64 in older patients, significantly lower than the good AUC range from 0.72 to 0.86 in younger patients. The MEDS had the best AUC (0.64 (0.57–0.71)) in older patients. In older and younger patients, the newly proposed qSOFA score (Sepsis 3.0) had a lower AUC than the PIRO score (sepsis 2.0). Conclusion The prognostic and discriminative performance of the five most commonly used disease severity scores was poor and less useful for risk stratification of older ED sepsis patients.