Abstract
Importance
The CURB-65 score is widely implemented as a prediction tool for identifying patients with community-acquired pneumonia (cap) at increased risk of 30-day mortality. However, since most ingredients of CURB-65 are used as general prediction tools, it is likely that other prediction tools, e.g. the British National Early Warning Score (NEWS), could be as good as CURB-65 at predicting the fate of CAP patients.
Objective
To determine whether NEWS is better than CURB-65 at predicting 30-day mortality of CAP patients.
Design
This was a single-centre, 6-month observational study using patients’ vital signs and demographic information registered upon admission, survival status extracted from the Danish Civil Registration System after discharge and blood test results extracted from a local database.
Setting
The study was conducted in the medical admission unit (MAU) at the Hospital of South West Jutland, a regional teaching hospital in Denmark.
Participants
The participants consisted of 570 CAP patients, 291 female and 279 male, median age 74 (20–102) years.
Results
The CURB-65 score had a discriminatory power of 0.728 (0.667–0.789) and NEWS 0.710 (0.645–0.775), both with good calibration and no statistical significant difference.
Conclusion
CURB-65 was not demonstrated to be significantly statistically better than NEWS at identifying CAP patients at risk of 30-day mortality.
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Acknowledgements
Dr. Mikkel Brabrand has full access to all the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Funding
This study received no external funding.
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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
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Brabrand, M., Henriksen, D.P. CURB-65 Score is Equal to NEWS for Identifying Mortality Risk of Pneumonia Patients: An Observational Study. Lung 196, 359–361 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00408-018-0105-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00408-018-0105-y