Scoring systems predicting neonatal mortality risk in newly administered neonates to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are useful in assessing the clinical status of the patient and determining the appropriate treatment modality as well as in making objective comparison of mortality rates among different NICU’s. Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology-Perinatal Extension-II (SNAP-PE-II) and Clinical Risk Index for Babies (CRIB) are two different scoring systems derived for use in the NICU. In this study, the efficacy of these two scoring systems on predicting mortality of the neonates admitted to the NICU of Ege University within the first day of life was evaluated. 197 neonates had very low birth weight and were found to be eligible for the study of total of 532 neonates admitted to the NICU between January 2002 and December 2003. Overall mortality rate was 6.2% (33/532) and mortality rate of the study group was 9.7% (19/197). Statistical analysis revealed that high CRIB and SNAP-PE-II scores were found to be correlated with mortality score (p<0.05 and p<0.01, respectively). Cut off value for CRIB was found to be 10, while it was 33 for SNAP-PE-II. From the point of discrimination, SNAP-PE-II was found to be associated with statistically significantly higher area under the curve (AUC) value (AUC: 0.97) compared with CRIB (AUC: 0.90) (p<0.01). Even though both scoring systems are limited for birth weight, according to our results, both can be used for predicting mortality. However, SNAP-PE-II was found to have better discriminative power.

Keywords: Neonatal mortalite, risk, skorlama, CRIB, SNAPPE-II, Neonatal mortality, scoring