Do risk stratification systems exist?
Yes, and there are many of them. Really simple, basic ones make adjustments for one or two risk factors only such as age and sex. More sophisticated ones study a number of risk factors and add up their contributions to the outcome of the operation. In heart surgery, two well-known systems are the Parsonnet system (from America) and the EuroSCORE (from Europe, as its name implies). EuroSCORE have a website which explains many of these issues and allows you to work out your own risk of dying from a particular heart operation, as long as you have some knowledge of your medical condition (go to http://www.euroscore.org/ and click on the “calculator” icon). Even more complex and highly accurate risk models have been developed both in Europe and America, so that the assessment of heart surgery risk is now an area of intensive and rapidly advancing research.
