I like the author’s use of the word “popular” to describe pediatric clinical dehydration scales. In case you’re not part of the “in crowd”, today’s “popular” dehydration scales include the World Health Organization scale, the Gorelick scale, and the Clinical Dehydration Scale.
This article is a prospective application of each of the three scales by a healthcare provider upon admission to one of three hospitals in Rwanda. Children were weighed on admission and then on discharge, and the gain in weight was used as the gold standard for comparison to each standardized dehydration scale.
So, bad news: each of these dehydration scoring scales is too complicated to hold in working memory, and you’d have to have it posted on a wall.
But, good news: in the words of the authors, “The WHO scale, Gorelick scale, and CDS did not have an area on the ROC curve statistically different from the reference line.”
Which means, you get to save your wall space because the dehydration scales gave false negatives or false positives as frequently as they gave true negatives and true positives. More research is necessary to derive more accurate clinical assessment of children presenting with possible dehydration.
“Comparing the accuracy of the 3 popular clinical dehydration scales in children with diarrhea.”