A new severity score for community-acquired pneumonia: PARB score

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is one of the most common diseases encountered in the emergency department (ED). For the ED physician, it is quite difficult to estimate the severity of CAP patients in the ED because most CAP patients present at an earlier stage of disease. Although several societies such as ATS, IDSA and BTS have established severity scores for CAP, those scores are too complicated to calculate easily, especially in a busy department such as the ED. Therefore, a new simple and useful severity score for CAP is necessary for ED physicians. The purpose of our study is to develop a new severity score for CAP using 30-day mortality or patients needing more than 2 weeks oxygen therapy as the main outcomes.