Validation of age-specific survival prediction in pediatric patients with blunt trauma using trauma and injury severity score methodology: a ten-year Nationwide observational study

BACKGROUND: In-hospital mortality in trauma patients has decreased recently owing to improved trauma injury prevention systems. However, no study has evaluated the validity of the Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) in pediatric patients by a detailed classification of patients’ age and injury severity in Japan. This retrospective nationwide study evaluated the validity of TRISS in predicting survival in Japanese pediatric patients with blunt trauma by age and injury severity. METHODS: Data were obtained from the Japan Trauma Data Bank during 2009–2018. The outcomes were as follows: (1) patients’ characteristics and mortality by age groups (neonates/infants aged 0 years, preschool children aged 1–5 years, schoolchildren aged 6–11 years, and adolescents aged 12–18 years), (2) validity of survival probability (Ps) assessed using the TRISS methodology by the four age groups and six Ps-interval groups (0.00–0.25, 0.26–0.50, 0.51–0.75, 0.76–0.90, 0.91–0.95, and 0.96–1.00), and (3) the observed/expected survivor ratio by age- and Ps-interval groups. The validity of TRISS was evaluated by the predictive ability of the TRISS method using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves that present the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, accuracy, area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) of TRISS. RESULTS: In all the age categories considered, the AUC for TRISS demonstrated high performance (0.935, 0.981, 0.979, and 0.977). The AUC for TRISS was 0.865, 0.585, 0.614, 0.585, 0.591, and 0.600 in Ps-interval groups (0.96–1.00), (0.91–0.95), (0.76. − 0.90), (0.51–0.75), (0.26–0.50), and (0.00–0.25), respectively. In all the age categories considered, the observed survivors among patients with Ps interval (0.00–0.25) were 1.5 times or more than the expected survivors calculated using the TRISS method. CONCLUSIONS: The TRISS methodology appears to predict survival accurately in Japanese pediatric patients with blunt trauma; however, there were several problems in adopting the TRISS methodology for younger blunt trauma patients with higher injury severity. In the next step, it may be necessary to develop a simple, high-quality prediction model that is more suitable for pediatric trauma patients than the current TRISS model. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12873-020-00385-0.