External validation of the ISARIC 4C Mortality Score to predict in-hospital mortality among patients with COVID-19 in a Canadian intensive care unit: a single-centre historical cohort study.

PURPOSE

With uncertain prognostic utility of existing predictive scoring systems for COVID-19-related illness, the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) 4C Mortality Score was developed by the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium as a COVID-19 mortality prediction tool. We sought to externally validate this score among critically ill patients admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) with COVID-19 and compare its discrimination characteristics to that of the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) scores.

METHODS

We enrolled all consecutive patients admitted with COVID-19-associated respiratory failure between 5 March 2020 and 5 March 2022 to our university-affiliated and intensivist-staffed ICU (Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, QC, Canada). After data abstraction, our primary outcome of in-hospital mortality was evaluated with an objective of determining the discriminative properties of the ISARIC 4C Mortality Score, using the area under the curve of a logistic regression model.

RESULTS

A total of 429 patients were included, 102 (23.8%) of whom died in hospital. The receiver operator curve of the ISARIC 4C Mortality Score had an area under the curve of 0.762 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.717 to 0.811), whereas those of the SOFA and APACHE II scores were 0.705 (95% CI, 0.648 to 0.761) and 0.722 (95% CI, 0.667 to 0.777), respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The ISARIC 4C Mortality Score is a tool that had a good predictive performance for in-hospital mortality in a cohort of patients with COVID-19 admitted to an ICU for respiratory failure. Our results suggest a good external validity of the 4C score when applied to a more severely ill population.