Introduction:

The Scale of Alvarado is a useful tool to stratify pediatric patients with abdominal pain according to the risk of acute appendicits.

Objective:

To determine the differences in the diagnostic performance of the scale of Alvarado for acute apendicitis in children according to age and sex groups.

Methods:

Observational, analytic and prospective study in 452 patients in the ages from 5 to 18 years that were admitted with abdominal pain or acute appendicitis in the Pediatric Surgery service of Centro Habana Teaching-Pediatric Hospital from January 2016 to January 2017. The sample was divided in two groups: with appendicitis and without appendicitis. It was used the hystological diagnosis as the main differentiation element.

Results:

The 54.8% of the patients with negative diagnosis of acute apendicitis were female adolescents. For these patients, in the 7 points of the scale as a cut pattern there was less sensitivity than in the case of male adolescents and school chlidren of both sexes (44.9% vs. 64.1%, 72.3% and 71.2%), respectively. The area under the Curve of Operative Characteristics of the Receptor was of 0,918 for male school children, significantly superior to the group of adolescents age, particularly in comparisson with the female adolescents that had an area under the curve of 0,802.

Conclusions:

In the patients without appendicitis there was a significative predominance of female adolescents. The scale had a good value of differentiation in male school children, comparatively higher to the group of adolescents age, finding the poorest differentiattion performance in the female adolescents.

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