Role of Scoring Systems Calculation in Predicting Extracorporeal Life Support Patients’ Outcomes: A Single Centre Experience

Purpose To investigate the predictive value of Acute Physiology, Age and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II, Simplified Acute Physiology (SAPS) II and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) scores for patient selection and timing to Extracorporeal Life Support (ECLS) as treatment of refractory cardiogenic shock. Methods Retrospective analysis of a prospectively-maintained operative dataset. Results Our study population included 185 patients receiving ECLS at our department between 2006 and 2018. Patient median age was 50.6 years; 62% were male. The most frequent reason for ECLS need, in our subset of patients, was post-cardiotomy syndrome (52.4%) followed by acute decompensation of chronic heart failure (17.5%), isolated right ventricular dysfunction (16.2%), acute myocardial infarction (10.2%) and myocarditis (3.7%). Median duration of ECLS was 8.9 days. Forty-one patients (22.2%) received heart transplantation. In-hospital mortality was 34.6% on ECLS running and 25.9% after ECLS removal. Multivariate regression analysis showed patient age, ECLS duration and bridge to transplantation (BTT) category as indipendent predictors of death (p Conclusion This study confirms the poor prognosis of critically ill patients receiving ECLS support. The APACHE II and SOFA scores, mainly, proved to be a reproducible evaluation tool with high prognostic abilities. In our population, age >65 years, ECLS duration >10 days and BTT ECLS intention appear to impact negatively.