Background:

The quick Sequential Sepsis-related Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) is a score that has been proposed to quickly identify patients at higher risk of death.

Objective:

To describe the usefulness of the qSOFA score to predict in-hospital mortality in cancer patients.

Material and methods:

Cross-sectional study carried out between January 2021 and December 2022. Hospital mortality was the dependent variable. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was calculated to determine the discriminative ability of qSOFA to predict in-hospital mortality.

Results:

A total of 587 cancer patients were included. A qSOFA score higher than 1 obtained a sensitivity of 57.2 %, specificity of 78.5 %, a positive predictive value of 55.4 % and negative predictive value of 79.7 %. The AUC of qSOFA for predicting in-hospital mortality was 0.70. In-hospital mortality of patients with qSOFA scores of 2 and 3 points was 52.7 and 64.4 %, respectively. In-hospital mortality was 31.9 % (187/587).

Conclusions:

qSOFA showed acceptable discriminative ability for predicting in-hospital mortality in cancer patients.