The newly published PREPARE score identifies high-risk patients for major complications after pancreatic resection
A multicenter study conducted at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; St. Josef-Hospital, Bochum; Ruhr-University, Germany; Humanitas Hospital of Milan, Italy; and University Hospital of Verona, Italy, developed and prospectively validated a simple, easy- to-use morbidity risk score, based on preoperative characteristics, that would predict major complications after pancreatic resection.
This study was presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the European Surgical Association (ESA), and has been recently published in the Annals of Surgery (Uzunoglu FG, Reeh M, Vettorazzi E, Ruschke T, Hannah P, Nentwich MF, Vashist YK, Bogoevski D, König A, Janot M, Gavazzi F, Zerbi A, Todaro V, Malleo G, Uhl W, Montorsi M, Bassi C, Izbicki JR, Bockhorn M. Preoperative Pancreatic Resection (PREPARE) Score: A Prospective Multicenter-Based Morbidity Risk Score. Ann Surg 2014, Epub ahead of print).
Eight independent preoperatively assessable variables were identified and included in the PREPARE scoring system: systolic blood pressure, heart rate, hemoglobin level, albumin level, ASA (American Society of Anesthesiologists) score, surgical procedure, elective surgery or not, and disease of pancreatic origin or not. On the basis of 3 subgroups (low risk, intermediate risk, high risk), the proposed scoring system reached an accuracy of 75% for correctly predicting occurrence or nonoccurrence of major surgical complications in 80% of all analyzed patients within the validation cohort.
Thus, the PREPARE score may allow preoperative identification of high-risk patients, which may influence decision making, treatment planning, and quality assessment in pancreatic surgery.
