Background: The Glasgow Prognostic Score (GPS) is commonly used to evaluate cancer patient prognosis. Early initiation of palliative care for end-stage cancer patients is crucial in providing comfort and preparing both patients and their families for a peaceful death. This study aimed to assess the value of GPS in predicting short-term mortality in end-stage cancer patients.
Methods: A retrospective analysis of in-hospital cancer deaths at a medical center in Taiwan over a five-year period was conducted. The discriminative ability, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of GPS were evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for predicting 30-, 21-, and 14-day mortality.
Results: Among the 5,315 in-hospital cancer deaths between 2009 and 2013, 78% of patients died within 30 days of admission (mean hospital stay = 12 days). The GPS scoring model’s predictive ability for short-term mortality was suboptimal for this cancer population (AUC = 0.548, 95% CI: 0.526–0.571). Although sensitivity was high (79.2%), specificity was low (30.3%), and overall accuracy was 68.0%.
Conclusion: The GPS scoring model has high sensitivity and may serve as a reference for initiating palliative care in end-stage cancer patients. However, due to its low specificity, caution should be exercised in applying GPS scores for end-of-life care planning and patient communication, as it does not accurately predict patient death.