Background: Early identification of severe cases of acute pancreatitis is necessary to reduce mortality. The Japanese severity score, which consists of nine prognostic factors, is reported to be useful for assessment of acute pancreatitis severity, but has not been validated by large-scale data.
Methods: Data on adult patients with acute pancreatitis were collected between July 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011, from a national administrative database covering 1,032 Japanese hospitals. In-hospital mortality was analyzed to evaluate the predictive value of the Japanese severity score.
Results: A total of 17,901 patients were included. Total in-hospital mortality was 2.6%, and mortality rates of non-severe and severe acute pancreatitis were 1.1 and 7.0%, respectively (P < 0.001). In multivariate analysis with adjustment for other baseline characteristics, the odds ratio for mortality significantly increased according to an increase in prognostic factor score. The odds ratio for mortality of computed tomography grade 3 was significantly higher than that of grade 1 (P < 0.001), but that of grade 2 was not (P = 0.149). In receiver operating characteristic curve analysis of the prognostic factor score for prediction of in-hospital mortality, the area under the curve was 0.798 (95% confidence interval 0.775-0.821), and the optimum cutoff level of the prognostic factors was 2, in accordance with the definition of the current scoring system.
Conclusions: The prognostic factor score has good predictive value for in-hospital mortality of acute pancreatitis, and thus is useful for severity assessment of acute pancreatitis at the early stage of hospital admission.