A Comparison of the Alvarado Score and the Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha Appendicitis (RIPASA) Score in the Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Background Diagnosing acute appendicitis remains a problem, especially in teenagers with right lower quadrant pain. Imaging studies aid in accurate diagnosis but have limitations such as cost and availability. The Modified Alvarado Scoring System (MASS) is simple and cost-effective with fewer parameters. The Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha Appendicitis scoring system (RIPASA), designed for Asian populations, includes more parameters. This study compares the effectiveness of RIPASA and Alvarado scores in diagnosing acute appendicitis in a specific clinical setting. Objectives To compare the scoring systems of RIPASA and Alvarado in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis at a tertiary care hospital. Methods Data has been collected from all patients who attended the NRI general hospital emergency department and outpatient wing with acute appendicitis, admitted as inpatients based on clinical history and relevant investigations. Patients satisfying inclusion and exclusion criteria were selected and the basic investigations were done. Summary statistics were done using mean, standard deviation and proportions. Inferential statistics were done by using an independent t-test, kappa statistic, sensitivity and specificity with a 95% confidence interval (CI). All the measurements are done using the statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) software version 21.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA) and open epidemiological (OpenEpi) software 3.01. A probability (p) <0.05 is considered as statistically significant. Results A total of 110 patients were analyzed for this study with a majority (39%) of them in the 21-30 age group. In our study, females (53%) outnumbered males (47%). Ultrasound findings in our cohort were acute appendicitis (93%), chronic appendicitis (2%) and normal appendix (5%). However, histopathology reported acute appendicitis (75%), chronic appendicitis (9%) and negative/non-specific (15%). The probability of appendicitis as predicted by Alvarado and RIPASA were 40% and 51% respectively. Definitive diagnosis of appendicitis was made in 16.4% with RIPASA whereas only 5.5% with Alvarado. When comparing the Alvarado and RIPASA scores, the sensitivity or true positive rate was higher for RIPASA (73.63%) than for Alvarado (50.55%). Conclusion There was a significant difference between the mean scores in Alvarado and RIPASA inpatients with scores suggestive of appendicitis and no appendicitis. Diagnostic accuracy was higher in RIPASA scoring compared to ALVARDO scoring. There was a significant statistical difference between the two scoring systems. When it comes to diagnosing in low-resource countries the study recommends a combination of Alvarado and RIPASA scoring systems.