title: Validation of the Sepsis Severity Score Compared with Updated Severity Scores in Predicting Hospital Mortality in Sepsis Patients.
abstract: Recently, the Sepsis Severity Score (SSS) was constructed to predict mortality in sepsis patients. The aim of this study was to compare performance of the SSS with the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II-IV, Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS) II, and SAPS 3 scores in predicting hospital outcome in sepsis patients.
  
  
  
  A retroprospective analysis was conducted in the medical intensive care unit of a tertiary university hospital.
  
  
  
  A total of 913 patients were enrolled; 476 of these patients (52.1%) had septic shock. The median SSS was 80 (range 20-137). The SSS presented good discrimination with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.892. However, the AUC of the SSS did not differ significantly from that of APACHE II (P = 0.07), SAPS II (P = 0.06), and SAPS 3 (P = 0.11). The APACHE IV score showed the best discrimination with an AUC of 0.948 and the overall performance by a Brier score of 0.096. The AUC of the APACHE IV score was statistically greater than the SSS, APACHE II, SAPS II, and SAPS 3 (P <0.0001 for all) and APACHE III (P = 0.0002). The calibration of all scores was poor with the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit H test <0.05.
  
  
  
  The SSS provided as good discrimination as the APACHE II, SAPS II, and SAPS 3 scores. However, the APACHE IV score had the best discrimination and overall performance in our sepsis patients. The SSS needs to be adapted and modified with new parameters to improve its performance.
authors.affiliation: Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai, Songkhla, Thailand.
authors.forename: Bodin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Khwannimit
authors.forename: Rungsun
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bhurayanontachai
authors.forename: Veerapong
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Vattanavanit
mesh_terms: D018806:APACHE; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D017052:Hospital Mortality; D006801:Humans; D007362:Intensive Care Units / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012372:ROC Curve; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D018805:Sepsis / Q000401:mortality* / Q000473:pathology*