World Journal of
Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences

DIAGNOSTIC ACCURACY OF ALVARADO SCORING FOR DIAGNOSIS OF ACUTE APPENDICITIS

Umer Qureshi*, Tabinda Shahid and Azalfa Shafi

ABSTRACT

Objective: To determine the diagnostic accuracy of Alvarado score in cases of acute appendicitis. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional validation study that was carried out during January to July 2018 at the Department of surgeries National Hospital and Medical centre and Fatima memorial Hospital Lahore. The cases were selected of either gender with age more than 12 years via non probability-consecutive sampling. The diagnosis of acute appendicitis was made on the basis of clinical signs and symptoms in the form of any degree of fever, vomiting and right sided abdominal pain assessed on visual analogue scale with raised total leucocyte count. True positive were labelled when there were inflammatory cells found on histopathology. The detailed Alvarado scoring system was used and to label the cut off value of 7 was used. Results: In the present study there were total 100 cases out of which 61 (61%) were males and 39% females. The mean age of the participants was 21.34±6.12 years and mean duration of symptoms was .12±1.47 hours. Mean Alvarado score in this study was 5.31±2.43. The sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV and diagnostic accuracy of Alvarado score 7 or more was seen in 93.42%, 75%, 92.21% 78.26% and 89% respectively with a significant p value of 0.001. Conclusion: Acute appendicitis is a surgical emergency and Alvarado score 7 or above has shown significantly good diagnostic accuracy in these cases.

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