Grading Scores for Identifying Patients at Risk of Delayed Cerebral Ischemia and Neurological Outcome in Spontaneous Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: A Comparison of Receiver Operator Curve Analysis

Abstract

Background: Numerous grading scales were proposed for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) to assess the likelihood of unfavorable neurological outcomes (UO) and the risk of delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI). We aimed to validate the Hemorrhage, Age, Treatment, Clinical Status, and Hydrocephalus (HATCH) score and the VASOGRADE, a simple grading scale for prediction of DCI after aneurysmal SAH.

Methods: This was a retrospective single-center study of patients with nontraumatic SAH (January 2016 to December 2021) admitted to the intensive care unit. We performed a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis to assess the discriminative ability of the HATCH and the VASOGRADE to identify patients who had UO at 3 months (defined as Glasgow Outcome Scale score of 1-3), hospital mortality, and DCI and compared their performance with the World Federation of Neurosurgical Surgeons, the modified Fisher, the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment, and the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II scales. We performed a multivariate logistic regression analysis to assess the association between HATCH and UO at 3 months and between VASOGRADE and DCI.

Results: We included 262 consecutive patients with nontraumatic SAH. DCI was observed in 82 patients (31.3%), whereas 78 patients (29.8%) died during hospital stay and 133 patients (51%) had UO at 3 months. HATCH was independently associated with UO (odds ratio 1.61, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.36-1.90) and had an area under the ROC curve (AUROC) of 0.83 (95% CI 0.77-0.88), comparable to the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (AUROC 0.84, 95% CI 0.79-0.89) and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (AUROC 0.83, 95% CI 0.77-0.88).

Conclusions: Hemorrhage, Age, Treatment, Clinical Status, and Hydrocephalus and VASOGARDE scores had a good performance to predict UO or in-hospital mortality and DCI, respectively; however, their performance did not outperform nonspecific routinely used scores.

Keywords: Functional outcome; Grading systems; Receiver operator curve; Stroke; Vasospasm.