Cancer-associated hypercalcemia: validation of a bedside prognostic score

Abstract

Until now, there was no validated and reliable tool to estimate life expectancy among patients with cancer-associated hypercalcemia (CAH). This study aimed to validate a prognostic score previously published. We studied a new cohort of 252 patients with CAH. Our prognostic score based on the four poor-prognosis factors (liver metastasis, squamous cell carcinoma, hypoalbuminemia, and calcemia >2.83 mmol) was implemented to this cohort. The accuracy of this score for the prediction of 90-day mortality was estimated with area under the curve of the receiver operator curve (AUC-ROC). Among this validation cohort, patients with score = 0 experienced a median overall survival of 797 days; whereas, patients with score >/=1 (at least one poor-prognosis factor) had median overall survival of 49 days (p < 0.0001). The AUC-ROC for the prediction of 90-day mortality were 0.88 (0.76-0.86) and 0.67 (0.61-0.74) in the development cohort and in the validation cohort, respectively. We have validated a reliable bedside prognostic score for CAH.