Arq. Bras. Cardiol. 2020; 114(3): 525-529
Prognostic Scores for Mortality in Cardiac Surgery for Infective Endocarditis
Alexandre Bahia Barreiras Martins, Cristiane da Cruz Lamas
This Short Editorial is referred by the Research article "Analysis of Risk Scores to Predict Mortality in Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery for Endocarditis".
The article by Pivatto F Jr et al. allows us to discuss the important issue of prognostic scores in patients who have cardiac surgery for infective endocarditis (IE). The management of left- sided IE often involves surgery during the index admission, and the main challenge is to rapidly and correctly identify patients at high risk and to transfer them to institutions with a surgical team with expertise in endocarditis surgery.
Prognostic scores are important for several reasons: a reasonable estimate of the risk of death is important in clinical decision-making regarding surgical indication; the estimate is necessary to inform patients and their families of the surgical risk; risk stratification permits a fair comparison of cardiac surgery results, so that surgeons and hospitals treating high-risk patients will not appear to have worse results than others. For operative mortality to remain a valid measure of quality of care, it must be related to the risk profile of the patients receiving surgery.
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