This is EMKases, EM Quick Hits podcast, where our team of experts and educators bring

a clear, concise, and condensed, practice-changing knowledge on all those EM topics you may not be

totally comfortable with. Cases, the latest evidence, procedural tips and tricks, pitfalls

to avoid, and the key take-home points and references on the EM cases website. Quick, let's

get on with it. First up, we have Sarah Reed, our new Pied's Quick Hits guru, talking about the

evidence for the park score, which heads up is probably the best risk stratification tool we have for kids we

suspect might have appendicitis.

Appendicitis is the most common surgical emergency in kids, and we all know that this is

often the biggest rule out when we're seeing a child with abdominal

pain. And it's definitely what the parents are worried about. So it can be really difficult to tell

who needs a surgical consult or an ultrasound, especially if this means you have to transfer the

child to your pediatric referral center. So the pediatric appendicitis risk calculator, or the

park, aims to help with the diagnosis of

appendicitis in kids. And this was originally derived and validated and published in

Pediatrics in April 2018. So the authors derived and validated the score in kids five to 18 years

of age, less than 96 hours of abdominal pain, who were under evaluation for suspected

appendicitis. And it was done in a pediatric emergency department setting. And then they compared

how this new score, this park, compared to the pediatric appendicitis score, which you might

have heard of. And they used the receiver operating characteristic curve,

looking at the area under the curve, and found that in this new park, it was 0.85 versus 0.77 for the

pediatric appendicitis score. So both of the scores are good at predicting appendicitis with a high

degree of accuracy, but the park was better.

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