SVEAT Score, a Potential New and Improved Tool for Acute Chest Pain Risk Stratification

Acute chest pain is one of the most common presenting symptoms to the emergency department. Currently available risk scores are suboptimal in identifying low-risk patients eligible for early and safe discharge. Various, initially obtained clinical data have valuable discriminating power but are not being fully utilized. We developed a new scoring system based on 5 sets of variables; characteristics of Symptoms, history of Vascular disease, Electrocardiography, Age, and Troponin (SVEAT score). A total of 321 subjects presenting to the emergency department or admitted to the clinical decision unit at our institution with chest pain from May 2017 to August 2018 were prospectively recruited. The subjects were followed for 30 days for any major cardiovascular events (MACE); acute myocardial infarction, confirmed coronary artery disease requiring revascularization or medical therapy or death. A 30-day MACE occurred in 19.6% of the subjects. Predictive ability of SVEAT score for a 30-day MACE was compared with HEART and TIMI risk score using receiving-operator characteristic curve. The area under the curve of SVEAT score (0.98, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.97 to 0.99) is higher than HEART (0.92, 95% CI 0.88 to 0.96) and TIMI score (0.88, 95% CI 083 to 0.93). Using SVEAT score of 4 as a cut off, 0.8% of the subjects developed a 30-day MACE compared with 1.4% and 1.5% of those classified as low-risk based on the HEART and TIMI score respectively. SVEAT score additionally identified larger proportion of low-risk (73.8%) than the HEART (45.2%) and TIMI risk score (40.1%), (p <0.01, for both).