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The Revised Cardiac Risk Index is used widely to estimate risk for cardiac complications in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery (JW Gen Med Sep 17 1999), but there is no comparable tool to predict overall postoperative mortality. To create such a tool, researchers used a database representing several hundred hospitals that was compiled by the American College of Surgeons. The cohort included 300,000 patients who underwent noncardiac surgery under general or regional anesthesia.
To keep the model simple, the researchers selected three variables — American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Physical Status, surgery-specific risk, and emergent versus nonemergent surgery — and calculated risk points corresponding to each variable's effect on …