Comparison of acute inflammatory score and Alvarado score in diagnosis of acute appendicitis at a tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Background: Acute appendicitis remains as one of the most common surgical entity requiring early intervention. Hence there is always a need to develop a well-designed protocol for diagnosis and to reduce negative appendectomy. The most common and widely applied was Alvarado score and best performed in validating studies, but was observed with few drawbacks. A recently introduced appendicitis inflammatory response score (AIR) was designed to overcome the drawbacks associated with the implementation of Alvarado scoring system. The objective the present study was to evaluate the AIR score on cases of suspicious appendicitis and to compare it with Alvarado scorings system.Methods: A prospective study for a period of two years from March 2015 to February 2017 was conducted on consecutive patients who presented to emergency department and scoring was performed based on the necessary variables.Results: The present study was conducted on 300 cases suspicious of appendicitis. The results analysed showed the area under the ROC curve of the AIR score was 0.94 and better than the area under the curve of Alvarado score of 0.82. The AIR score also did well in difficult cases of women, children when compared to Alvarado score in diagnosis of appendicitis. In our study, in cases with >8 points, a lower sensitivity was observed in AIR scoring than Alvarado scoring (0.26 vs. 0.12), but was associated with higher specificity (1.00 vs. 0.95). In these cases, PPV turned out to be 1.00 for AIR scoring and 0.77 for Alvarado scoring.Conclusions: To conclude, AIR scoring performed well almost equally with Alvarado system with high specificity and high negative predictive value preventing unnecessary negative appendectomies. Follow up of these cases will help in deciding surgical intervention in unnecessary cases. This scoring system also prevents unnecessary and costly radiological investigations thereby reducing the financial burden to the patients.