A novel scoring system predicts stroke-associated pneumonia!

Published on March 30, 2023

Imagine you’re an archaeologist trying to uncover the secrets of an ancient tomb. In order to understand the tomb’s history and purpose, you analyze the artifacts found inside and use them to piece together a story. Similarly, scientists have developed a new scoring system, called TIPS, to predict the occurrence of stroke-associated pneumonia (SAP) in patients with ischemic stroke. TIPS combines both inflammatory and thrombus biomarkers to give a comprehensive picture of the patient’s risk. The study, conducted on over 800 patients, found that a high TIPS score was associated with a greater likelihood of SAP and higher mortality rates. The TIPS score outperformed other clinical scores and biomarkers currently used in practice. This research suggests that by using TIPS, healthcare providers may be able to identify patients at high-risk for SAP after ischemic stroke early on. To learn more about this fascinating study, check out the full article!

BackgroundInflammation and thrombosis are involved in the development of stroke-associated pneumonia (SAP). Our aim was to evaluate the predictive value of a novel, simplified, thrombo-inflammatory prognostic score (TIPS) that combines both inflammatory and thrombus biomarkers in the early phase of ischemic stroke (IS).MethodsThe study population consisted of 897 patients with a first diagnosis of IS admitted to the emergency department of five tertiary hospitals in China. Of these, the data from 70% of patients was randomly selected to derive the model and the other 30% for model validation. A TIPS of “2” was indicative of high inflammation and thrombosis biomarkers and “1” of one biomarker, with “0” indicative of absence of biomarkers. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to identify the association between TIPS and SAP.ResultsThe TIPS was an independent predictor of SAP and 90-day mortality, with the incidence of SAP being significantly higher for patients with a high TIPS. The TIPS provided superior predictive value for SAP than clinical scores (A2DS2) and biomarkers currently used in practice, for both the derivation and validation sets. Mediation analysis revealed that TIPS provided a predictive value than either thrombotic (NLR) and inflammatory (D-dimer) biomarkers alone.ConclusionThe TIPS score may be a useful tool for early identification of patients at high-risk for SAP after IS.

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