Prediction of mortality and functional outcome from status epilepticus and independent external validation of STESS and EMSE scores

BACKGROUND: Two clinical scoring systems, the status epilepticus severity score (STESS) and the epidemiology-based mortality score in status epilepticus (EMSE), are used to predict mortality in patients with status epilepticus (SE). The aim of this study was to compare the outcome-prediction function of the two scoring systems regarding in-hospital mortality using a multicenter large cohort of adult patients with SE. Moreover, we studied the potential role of these two scoring systems in predicting the functional outcome in patients with SE. METHODS: The SE cohort consisted of patients from the epilepsy centers of eight academic tertiary medical centers in South Korea. The clinical and electroencephalography data for all adult patients with SE from January 2013 to December 2014 were derived from a prospective SE database. The primary outcome variable was defined as in-hospital death. The secondary outcome variable was defined as a poor functional outcome, i.e., a score of 1–3 on the Glasgow Outcome Scale, at discharge. RESULTS: Among the 120 non-hypoxic patients with SE recruited into the study, 16 (13.3 %) died in the hospital and 64 (53.3 %) were discharged with a poor functional outcome. The receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve for prediction of in-hospital death based on the STESS had an area under the curve of 0.673 with an optimal cutoff value for discrimination (best match for both sensitivity (0.56) and specificity (0.70)) that was ≥4 points. The two combinations of elements of the EMSE system (EMSE-ALDEg and EMSE-ECLEg) predicted not only in-hospital mortality with the best match for sensitivity (more than 0.6) and specificity (more than 0.6), but also a poor functional outcome with the best match for both sensitivity (>0.7) and specificity (>0.6). STESS did not predict a poor functional outcome (area under the ROC, 0.581; P = 0.23). CONCLUSION: Although the EMSE is a clinical scoring system that focuses on individual mortality, we did not find differences between the EMSE and STESS in the prediction of in-hospital death. The EMSE was useful in predicting poor functional outcome, as it was significantly better than STESS. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13054-016-1190-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.