Risk stratification for adult congenital heart surgery.
OBJECTIVE
At this moment, no risk stratification models are available for adult congenital cardiac surgery. This study aims to identify a suitable stratification tool for the adult congenital heart surgery population. Pediatric congenital cardiac surgery score models were therefore tested in an adult congenital population. In addition, an age component was added to these models and performance was compared with the original score systems.


METHODS
The Risk Adjustment in Congenital Heart Surgery (RACHS-1), Basic Aristotle Score, Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS)-European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS) Score and Comprehensive Aristotle Score were calculated for all adult patients who underwent congenital cardiac surgery between January 1990 and January 2007 in a single center (N=963). In addition, an age component was added to these models. Discrimination was then tested for all models with and without the age component.


RESULTS
Application of the original pediatric risk scores resulted in c-statistics for 30-day mortality of 0.60, 0.60, 0.60, and 0.66 respectively. Combining these models with the age component resulted in significantly higher c-statistics of 0.69, 0.70, 0.69, and 0.76 respectively. Age as a sole predictor already resulted in a c-statistic of 0.67. Comparable results were found for 1-year mortality.


CONCLUSIONS
The discriminatory power of the pediatric risk scores was suboptimal, but increased when adding age as a score component. The best performance was achieved by the combination of age and the Comprehensive Aristotle Score, for both 30-day and 1-year mortality.
van Gameren
Menno
M
Department of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. m.vangameren@erasmusmc.nl
Putman
Léon M
LM
Takkenberg
Johanna J M
JJ
Bogers
Ad J J C
AJ
D000328:Adult; D017677:Age Distribution; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D006348:Cardiac Surgical Procedures / Q000009:adverse effects* / Q000401:mortality; D006330:Heart Defects, Congenital / Q000401:mortality / Q000601:surgery*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012307:Risk Factors; D055815:Young Adult