In order to create and evaluate a risk score to support clinician judgment on the necessity for intubation, for a study, researchers sought to identify predictors of airway compromise among the patients coming to the emergency department with angioedema.
There was a retrospective chart study of patients with angioedema who were seen in the emergency room. They were separated into training and test sets randomly once the data was extracted. The training set was used to identify risk indicators for intubation and to create a model and risk score to anticipate intubation. Next, the test set was applied using the model and risk score.
There were 594 patients involved in all. The final model and risk score included independent variables such as a prior medical history of hypertension, the appearance of shortness of breath, drooling, and anterior tongue or pharyngeal enlargement. The training set’s Area Under the Curve for the Receiver Operator Characteristic curve was 87.55%, while the test sets was 86.1% (77.62%-94.60%).
A simple scoring method may aid in predicting whether angioedema patients are at high or low risk for intubation. Before this decision aid is widely used, external confirmation of this score is required.
Reference: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675722006520
