Dear Sir,
The European System for Cardiac Operative Risk Evaluation (EuroSCORE) identifies a number of risk factors which help to predict mortality from cardiac surgery.1 The predicted mortality (in percent) is calculated by adding the weights assigned to each factor. Since its initial publication in 1999, EuroSCORE has been widely used in Europe and elsewhere and has been the subject of several studies. Most of these studies compared the predictive ability of the EuroSCORE to previously described systems2,3 or to locally derivedmodels.4 One original work used it as a tool in order to assess the intra-institutional benefit in switching from conventional surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass to the off-pump approach in coronary surgery.5 In general, EuroSCORE was found to be …