Prognostic accuracy of age-adapted SOFA, SIRS, PELOD-2, and qSOFA for in-hospital mortality among children with suspected infection admitted to the intensive care unit.

SIRS criteria lack specificity to identify children with infection at substantially higher risk of mortality. We demonstrate that adapting Sepsis-3 to age-specific criteria performs better than Sepsis-2-based criteria. Our findings support the translation of Sepsis-3 into paediatric-specific sepsis definitions and highlight the importance of robust paediatric organ dysfunction characterization.