title: Cancer-associated hypercalcemia: validation of a bedside prognostic score.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Until now, there was no validated and reliable tool to estimate life expectancy among patients with cancer-associated hypercalcemia (CAH). This study aimed to validate a prognostic score previously published.
  
  
  METHODS
  We studied a new cohort of 252 patients with CAH. Our prognostic score based on the four poor-prognosis factors (liver metastasis, squamous cell carcinoma, hypoalbuminemia, and calcemia >2.83 mmol) was implemented to this cohort. The accuracy of this score for the prediction of 90-day mortality was estimated with area under the curve of the receiver operator curve (AUC-ROC).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Among this validation cohort, patients with score = 0 experienced a median overall survival of 797 days; whereas, patients with score >/=1 (at least one poor-prognosis factor) had median overall survival of 49 days (p < 0.0001). The AUC-ROC for the prediction of 90-day mortality were 0.88 (0.76-0.86) and 0.67 (0.61-0.74) in the development cohort and in the validation cohort, respectively.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We have validated a reliable bedside prognostic score for CAH.
authors.affiliation: Département de Cancérologie Générale, Centre Oscar Lambret, 3, Rue F Combemale, 5902 Lille, France. n-penel@o-lambret.fr
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Penel
authors.forename: Sylvain
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dewas
authors.forename: Aurélien
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hoffman
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Adenis
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002294:Carcinoma, Squamous Cell / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006934:Hypercalcemia / Q000209:etiology*; D034141:Hypoalbuminemia / Q000150:complications; D007223:Infant; D008113:Liver Neoplasms / Q000556:secondary; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D011379:Prognosis; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D015996:Survival Rate; D055815:Young Adult