ArticlePediatric critical care medicine : a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies2025
Phoenix Sepsis Criteria in Critically Ill Children: Retrospective Validation Using a United States Nine-Center Dataset, 2012-2018.
Article in Pediatric critical care medicine : a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Discrimination performance of the Phoenix sepsis score versus pediatric sequential organ failure assessment for predicting in-hospital mortality in critically ill children: a multicenter external validation study.World journal of pediatrics : WJP · 2026Article
- Cytokine-based strategies to improve prognostic enrichment of pediatric ARDS.Critical care (London, England) · 2026Observational
- A comparison of pediatric sepsis definitions based on systemic inflammatory response syndrome and Phoenix criteria: a single-center PICU retrospective study.Italian journal of pediatrics · 2026Article
- The Phoenix Criteria and Other Severity Scores in Identifying Pediatric Sepsis.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Care Pathway and Outcomes in Pediatric Septic Shock: A Narrative Review from Emergency Department Recognition to PICU Management.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- External validation of the Phoenix Sepsis Score in a paediatric intensive care unit in Saudi Arabia.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Comparison of Phoenix Sepsis Score and traditional scoring systems in predicting mortality in PICU patients with suspected infection.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Utility of Phoenix Sepsis Score for Predicting Mortality in Pediatric Sepsis: A Prospective Analytical Study from a Resource-limited Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Eastern India.Indian journal of critical care medicine : peer-reviewed, official publication of Indian Society of Critical Care Medicine · 2026Article
- Assessment of Phoenix sepsis score: characterization of a cohort of children of different primary statuses and ages, 2020-2024.European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology · 2025Article
- The authors reply.Pediatric critical care medicine : a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies · 2025Article
- We Have New Sepsis Criteria for Children…Now What?Hospital pediatrics · 2025Article
- New sepsis-associated morbidity and mortality in pediatric oncology patients.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Risk factors for mortality and development of a predictive model in pediatric sepsis.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo perform: 1) external validation of the Phoenix Sepsis Score and Phoenix sepsis criteria in a multicenter cohort of critically ill children with infection and a comparison with the 2005 International Pediatric Sepsis Consensus Conference (IPSCC) criteria; 2) a study of Phoenix sepsis criteria performance in patient subgroups based on age and comorbidities; 3) an assessment of microbiological profile of children with Phoenix sepsis; and 4) a study of the performance of the Phoenix-8 score.
designSecondary, retrospective analysis of a multicenter cohort study from 2012 to 2018.
settingNine PICUs in the United States. PATIENTS: PICU admissions with suspected infection.
interventionsNone. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN
resultsAmong 25,680 encounters of children with suspected or confirmed infection on PICU admission (4.6% in-hospital mortality), 11,168 (43%) met Phoenix criteria for sepsis or septic shock (9% in-hospital mortality). The Phoenix criteria generally outperformed the IPSCC criteria at discriminating mortality in all critically ill children with infections and across all subgroup analyses, including age group, malignancy, or technology dependence. Of 11,168 patients who met Phoenix criteria, 28% were negative for IPSCC criteria for sepsis and these had higher in-hospital mortality than those who met IPSCC sepsis criteria but not Phoenix criteria (4.7% vs.1.7%; p < 0.001), which was similar to the mortality of patients without sepsis (1.3%). Sepsis was associated with respiratory or bloodstream infection, most commonly Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Staphylococcus aureus. The Phoenix-8 score had good discrimination of mortality in children with infections, comparable to or better than validated and widely used severity of illness and organ dysfunction scores.
conclusionsIn 2012-2018, among U.S. patients with suspected or confirmed infection admitted to nine PICUs, those with the highest risk of mortality can be identified using the Phoenix sepsis criteria, including in children of different age groups and those with major comorbidities.
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