APACHE IV system helps to determine cholecystostomy role in elderly patients with acute cholecystitis

Background Cholecystostomy offers an alternative method for patients unfit to undergo immediate cholecystectomy. Nevertheless, the role of cholecystostomy in the clinical management of high-risk surgical patients remains unclear. One of the main problems concerning the therapeutic effect in critically ill patients with acute cholecystitis is the lack of validated, well-established scoring systems to stratify the severity of patient disease states. APACHE IV scoring system was useful to estimate the hospital mortality for high-risk patients. We try to evaluate the performance of the APACHE IV scoring system in patients over 65 years of age with acute cholecystitis and the therapeutic effect of percutaneous cholecystostomy. Methods 597 patients over 65 years of age with acute cholecystitis between January 2011 and December 2018 were retrospectively analyzed with the APACHE IV scores. Results Among the 597 patients, 52 successfully underwent cholecystectomy (2 died, 3.85%), 65 underwent percutaneous cholecystostomy (1 died, 1.54%), and 480 received conservative therapy (27 died, 5.63%). The fitness of the APACHE IV score prediction is good with the area under the ROC curve of 0.894. The APACHE IV models were well-calibrated (with the Hosmer-Lemeshow statistic). Using the method of binary regression analysis, for the patients whose estimated mortality rate was more than 10%, cholecystostomy was an important factor for prognosis (P = 0.048). The estimated mortality of PC patients before and after operation was compared, which indicated that the estimated mortality after puncture was significantly decreased, either in the whole patient group (P = 0.004) or in the group with an estimated mortality greater than 10% (P = 0.008). Conclusion The APACHE IV scoring system showed that cholecystostomy was a safe and effective treatment for elderly high-risk patients with acute cholecystitis.