A Simple Prediction Score for Diagnosis of Acute Pancreatitis

The diagnostic accuracy (DA) for patients with acute pancreatitis (AcPa) has been rarely evaluated.

In the AcPa study group, there were 22 patients versus 1,311 patients in the non-AcPa group. The clinical history-taking variables (CHT) (n=22), clinical signs & tests details (CST) (n=14), and laboratory analyses (n=3) were recorded in each patient. Meta-analytical techniques were used to detect the summary sensitivity (Se) and specificity (Sp) estimates for each data set; CHT, CST, and diagnostic scores (DS).

In receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, the area under curve (AUC) values for i) CHT, ii) CST, and iii) DS were as follows: i) AUC=0.640 (95%CI=0.550-0.730); ii) AUC=0.588 (95%CI=0.520-0.656), and iii) AUC=0.943 (95%CI=0.910-0.976). The differences between these AUC values (roccomp analysis) are as follows: i) versus ii) p=0.155; i) versus iii) p<0.0001; ii) versus iii) p<0.0001.

The new DS introduced in this study proved to be far superior to both symptoms and signs & tests in its DA for AcPa, as demonstrated by HSROC analysis.