[Paediatric sequential organ failure assessment (pSOFA) score: A new mortality prediction score in the paediatric...

To assess performance of the age-adapted SOFA score in children admitted into Paediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs) and whether the SOFA score can compete with the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) in diagnosing sepsis, as recommended in the Sepsis-3 consensus definitions.

Two-centre prospective observational study in 281 children admitted to the PICU. We calculated the SOFA, Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM), and Pediatric Index of Mortality-2 (PIM2) scores and assessed for the presence of SIRS at admission. The primary outcome was 30-day mortality.

The SOFA score was higher in nonsurvivors (P<.001) and mortality increased progressively across patient subgroups from lower to higher SOFA scores. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that the area under the curve (AUC) of the SOFA score for predicting 30-day mortality was 0.89, compared to AUCs of 0.84 and 0.79 for the PRISM and PIM2 scores, respectively. The AUC of the SOFA score for predicting a prolonged stay in the PICU was 0.67. The SOFA score was correlated to the PRISM score (r_s=0.59) and the PIM2 score (r_s=0.51). In children with infection, the AUC of the SOFA score for predicting mortality was 0.87 compared to an AUC of 0.60 using SIRS. The diagnosis of sepsis applying a SOFA cutoff of 3 points predicted mortality better than both the SIRS and the SOFA cutoff of 2 points recommended by the Sepsis-3 consensus.

The SOFA score at admission is useful for predicting outcomes in the general PICU population and is more accurate than SIRS for definition of paediatric sepsis.