BACKGROUND

Gastrointestinal cancer surgery continues to be a significant cause of postoperative complications and mortality in high-risk patients. It is crucial to identify these patients. Our study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of specific perioperative risk assessment tools to predict postoperative complications, identifying the most informative variables and combining them to test their prediction ability as a new score.

METHODS

A prospective cohort study of digestive cancer surgical patients admitted to the surgical intermediate care unit of the Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto, Portugal was conducted during the period January 2016 to April 2018. Demographic and medical information including sex, age, date from hospital admission, diagnosis, emergency or elective admission, and type of surgery, were collected. We analyzed and compared a set of measurements of surgical risk using the risk assessment instruments P-POSSUM Scoring, ACS NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator, and ARISCAT Risk Score according to the outcomes classified by the Clavien-Dindo score. According to each risk score system, we studied the expected and observed post-operative complications. We performed a multivariable regression model retaining only the significant variables of these tools (age, gender, physiological P-Possum, and ACS NSQIP serious complication rate) and created a new score (). The predictive ability of each continuous score and the final panel obtained was evaluated using ROC curves and estimating the area under the curve (AUC).

RESULTS

We studied 341 patients. Our results showed that the predictive accuracy and agreement of P-POSSUM Scoring, ACS NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator, and ARISCAT Risk Score were limited. The , shows to have greater discrimination ability than the one obtained with the other risk tools when evaluated individually (AUC = 0.808; 95% CI: 0.755-0.862). The expected and observed complication rates were similar to the new risk tool as opposed to the other risk calculators.

CONCLUSIONS

The feasibility and usefulness of the have been demonstrated for the evaluation of patients undergoing digestive oncologic surgery. However, it requires further testing through a multicenter prospective study to validate the predictive accuracy of the proposed risk score.