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Evaluation of a Clinical Dehydration Scale in Children Requiring Intravenous Rehydration
Pediatrics, 05/10/2012
Kinlin LM et al. – In children administered intravenous rehydration, the clinical dehydration scale (CDS) was characterized by moderate interobserver reliability and weak associations with objective measures of disease severity. These data do not support its use as a tool to dictate the need for intravenous rehydration or to predict clinical course.
Methods- Participants were 226 children older than 3 months who presented to a tertiary care emergency department and required intravenous rehydration.
- Reliability was assessed at treatment initiation, by comparing the scores assigned independently by a trained research nurse and a physician.
- Validity was assessed by using parameters reflective of disease severity: weight gain, baseline laboratory results, willingness of the physician to discharge the patient, hospitalization, and length of stay.
- Interobserver reliability was moderate, with a weighted of 0.52 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.41, 0.63).
- There was no correlation between CDS score and percent weight gain, a proxy measure of fluid deficit.
- There were, however, modest and statistically significant correlations between CDS score and several other parameters, including serum bicarbonate and length of stay (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.24; 95% CI 0.11, 0.36).
- The scale’s discriminative ability was assessed for the outcome of hospitalization, yielding an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.65 (95% CI 0.57, 0.73).