A Simple Prediction Score for Diagnosis of Acute Pancreatitis

Abstract

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

Patients and methods: 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).

Results: 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.

Conclusion: 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.

Keywords: Abdominal pain; HSROC; acute pancreatitis; diagnostic accuracy; diagnostic score.