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. 2020 Oct;38(10):2074-2080.
doi: 10.1016/j.ajem.2020.07.019. Epub 2020 Jul 12.

Predictive performance of SOFA and qSOFA for in-hospital mortality in severe novel coronavirus disease

Sijia Liu  1 , Ni Yao  2 , Yanru Qiu  3 , Chengqi He  4
Affiliations

Predictive performance of SOFA and qSOFA for in-hospital mortality in severe novel coronavirus disease

Sijia Liu et al. Am J Emerg Med. 2020 Oct.

Abstract

Objectives: The assessment of illness severity at admission can contribute to decreased mortality in patients with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) and Quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) scoring systems at admission for the prediction of mortality risk in COVID-19 patients.

Methods: We included 140 critically ill COVID-19 patients. Data on demographics, clinical characteristics, and laboratory findings at admission were used to calculate SOFA and qSOFA against the in-hospital outcomes (survival or death) that were ascertained from the medical records. The predictive accuracy of both scoring systems was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis.

Results: The area under the ROC curve for SOFA in predicting mortality was 0.890 (95% CI: 0.826-0.955), which was higher than that of qSOFA (0.742, 95% CI 0.657-0.816). An optimal cutoff of ≥3 for SOFA had sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of 90.00%, 83.18%, 50.00%, and 97.80%, respectively.

Conclusions: This novel report indicates that SOFA could function as an effective adjunctive risk-stratification tool at admission for critical COVID-19 patients. The performance of qSOFA is accepted but inferior to that of SOFA.

Keywords: Mortality; Novel coronavirus disease; Quick sequential organ failure assessment; Sequential organ failure assessment.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest Sijia Liu, Ni Yao, YanruQiu, and Chengqi He declared there are no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Disposition of the study population.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Classification performances of the SOFA and qSOFA scores.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

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