Background: Accurate prognostication is essential in caring for palliative patients. Various prognostication tools have been validated in many settings in the past few years. Biomarkers of inflammation (albumin and C-reactive protein) are combined to calculate the modified Glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), which has been found to be a simple prognostic tool in this population.
Objective: This retrospective cohort study was to evaluate mGPS as a prognostication tool for cancer patients admitted to an acute hospital in regional Australia.
Methods: Adult cancer patients admitted to an acute Australian regional hospital during 2017 who had albumin and C-reactive protein (CRP) tested were included. The mGPS was calculated based on their admission values and discharge values. Based on their score (0-2), groups were compared using univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis for prognostication. Kaplan-Meier survival plots and median survival time from admission and discharge were constructed.
Results: A total of 170 patient records were reviewed of which 95 had admission and discharge mGPS scores available for analysis. Of those, 86 had died at the time of data analysis. The median survival for admission mGPS 0, 1, 2 was 168,156 and 74 days. For discharge mGPS 0, 1, 2 medians were 168,119 and 70 days. On multi variate analysis admission mGPS 2 showed Hazard ratio of 2.29 (95% CI 1.16-4.56, p -0.02) and discharge mGPS 2 of 2.07 (95% CI 0.95-4.50, p value 0.07).
Conclusions: In this study, mGPS was able to differentiate cancer patients into various prognostic groups. Further studies in regional acute hospitals could validate this prospectively with a multi-center larger sample size.
Keywords: Australia; mGPS; oncology; palliative; prognostication; regional.