The most commonly used disease severity scores are inappropriate for risk stratification of older emergency department sepsis patients: an observational multi-centre study

Background Sepsis recognition in older emergency department (ED) patients is difficult due to atypical symptom presentation. We therefore investigated whether the prognostic and discriminative performance of the five most commonly used disease severity scores were appropriate for risk stratification of older ED sepsis patients (≥70 years) compared to a younger control group (<70 years).