Clinical complexity of an Italian cardiovascular intensive care unit: the role of mortality and severity risk scores

Aims The identification of patients at greater mortality risk of death at admission into an intensive cardiovascular care unit (ICCU) has relevant consequences for clinical decision-making. We described patient characteristics at admission into an ICCU by predicted mortality risk assessed with noncardiac intensive care unit (ICU) and evaluated their performance in predicting patient outcomes. Methods A total of 202 consecutive patients (130 men, 75 ± 12 years) were admitted into our tertiary-care ICCU in a 20-week period. We evaluated, on the first 24 h data, in-hospital mortality risk according to Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) and Simplified Acute Physiology Score 3 (SAPS 3); Sepsis related Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) Score and the Mayo Cardiac intensive care unit Admission Risk Score (M-CARS) were also calculated. Results Predicted mortality was significantly lower than observed (5% during ICCU and 7% at discharge) for APACHE II and SAPS 3 (17% for both scores). Mortality risk was associated with older age, more frequent comorbidities, severe clinical presentation and complications. The APACHE II, SAPS 3, SOFA and M-CARS had good discriminative ability in distinguishing deaths and survivors with poor calibration of risk scores predicting mortality. Conclusion In a recent contemporary cohort of patients admitted into the ICCU for a variety of acute and critical cardiovascular conditions, scoring systems used in general ICU had good discrimination for patients’ clinical severity and mortality. Available scores preserve powerful discrimination but the overestimation of mortality suggests the importance of specific tailored scores to improve risk assessment of patients admitted into ICCUs.