Scoring systems for assessing organ dysfunction and survival

Sepsis is associated with high mortality and morbidity. Scoring systems to describe organ dysfunction or predict survival are widely used in septic, as in other critically ill, patients. Such scores can facilitate description of patient populations, for example, for inclusion in clinical trials, and can enable comparison between intensive care units or within the same intensive care unit over time. Although early systems focused primarily on survival prediction or the presence or absence of organ failure, recent years have seen the development of newer models able to describe the evolution of individual and multiple organ dysfunction. The authors discuss the organ dysfunction and survival scoring systems most commonly used in the intensive care unit.