Have Severity Scores a Place in Predicting Septic Complications in ICU Multiple Trauma Patients?

Risk assessment in ICU critically-ill patients is of tremendous importance for optimizing patients’ clinical management, medical and human resource allocation and supporting medical cost distribution and containment.
The problem of predicting complications and mortality in ICU patients, although not new, is of genuine concern and much effort has been made to detect the most reliable parameters and scores. Numerous attempts have been made to use clinical and laboratory findings integrated into different algorithms or to incorporate these parameters into easy to use composite severity scores which would be applicable in various centers. In addition to clinical data, biomarkers or laboratory findings have been used for this purpose [1-3].
The SOFA, SAPS and APACHE scores and their newer versions, have been used worldwide to evaluate patients’ severity, prognosis, and survival [4-7]. However, it has been reported that there are differences in their performance and estimation probability, in different geographical areas [8]. [More]