Evaluation of Alvarado Score in Acute Appendicitis Patients Hospitalized in the Emergency Department of A Hospital During 2008- 2009
Ali Reza Kabiri* and Farhang Farokhi Nejad  

School of Medicine, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran

Abstract: Acute appendicitis is one of the most important and common causes of acute abdominal pain in patients admitted to the emergency department of hospitals. Diagnosis of this disease in people admitting with abdominal pain is not simple. On the one hand, delay in diagnosis is the most important factor of in increasing mortality in these patients. This study aims to investigate the Alvarado scores in acute appendicitis patients hospitalized in an emergency department. This is a retrospective cross-sectional study conducted on 480 patients (354 male, 126 female) diagnosed with acute appendicitis and underwent appendectomy in a surgical ward. Patients with identical Alvarado scores were placed in separate groups and the diagnostic accuracy of each score (1 to 10) was calculated for all patients based on age gender. To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of Alvarado scoring in both genders compared with the total population, Independent T sample test was used. In addition, the appendix phase was extracted by the information available in the file. From the Alvarado scores - in the total study population - tenderness with 16.99% (480/476 patients), and temperature rise with 37.39% (480/189 patients) had the lowest frequency. This amount (sensitivity of Alvarado score > 6) was 6.89%, and 3/87% in men and women, respectively. No statistically significant difference in diagnostic sensitivity was observed in any of the above groups. In investigation patients for appendix phase, supportive phase had the highest frequency. Our findings show that Alvarado scoring system can be used as a proper diagnostic method in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. In addition, it was shown that supportive phase had the highest frequency.

Keywords: Acute appendicitis; Appendectomy; Alvarado score

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