The mortality ratio and the validity of the original EuroSCORE in patients over the age of 70 undergoing cardiovascular surgery

Introduction
The aim of our study was to evaluate the performance of the European Cardiac Operative Risk Assessment System (EuroSCORE) in predicting mortality in elderly patients aged 70 years and older undergoing elective cardiovascular surgery.

Material and methods
The hospital data of 112 patients aged 70 years and older who underwent elective cardiovascular surgery procedures at a state hospital clinic in Turkey were scanned retrospectively. The demographic, medical, surgical, and postoperative information and risk factors for the patients were recorded and evaluated. The patients were divided into 3 groups according to the EuroSCORE system. In-hospital death was defined as the end-point of the study.

Results
The overall mortality was 5.35%. 28.57% of the patients were in the low-risk group, whereas the rates in the medium- and high-risk groups were 61.60% and 9.83%, respectively. The mean EuroSCORE was 5.33 ± 2.50 in the deceased group and 3.17 ± 1.90 in the surviving patient group (p = 0.0093). The number of observed predicted deceased cases did not differ between different risk groups (p = 0.23). The area under curve (AUC) for the EuroSCORE was 0.932 ± 0.019; p < 0.0001, with a 95% CI of 0.8950–0.9704.

Conclusions
The AUC for the EuroSCORE in our cases was higher than the reported articles with a similar age group. We suggest that the EuroSCORE assessed operative risk in octogenarians with significantly high efficiency.