Sepsis Screening Tool Accuracy: A Meta-Analysis Across 14 Low- and Middle-Income Countries

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 studies encompassing 30,310 patients from 14 low- and middle-income countries. It evaluates the diagnostic accuracy of sepsis screening tools like qSOFA, NEWS, MEWS, SIRS, and SOFA. The dataset was created by Jiale Tong and published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Comparing the pooled sensitivity and specificity of clinical sepsis screening tools based on the reported meta-analysis results.
• Evaluating the trade-off between rule-in and rule-out utility for tools like qSOFA based on reported likelihood ratios.
• Assessing the discriminative ability of tools requiring laboratory parameters versus purely clinical assessments based on the reported AUROC values.
• Investigating heterogeneity in diagnostic tool performance across different low- and middle-income country settings based on the reported I² statistic.

Strengths

• Includes data from 27 studies and 30,310 patients, providing a substantial evidence base.
• Compares performance metrics (sensitivity, specificity, AUROC, LR+/LR-) for six distinct screening tools.
• Focuses specifically on 14 low- and middle-income countries, addressing a key evidence gap.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small (15.1 KB), suggesting it contains summary statistics rather than patient-level data.
• Row and column structures are unknown, requiring inspection after download to understand the data layout.
• Substantial heterogeneity was observed across the included studies (I² > 75%), which may affect generalizability.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Jiale Tong.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis of studies from PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and Global Index Medicus.

Time Range

Studies from database inception through June 2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-20 05:50:17.

Geography

14 low- and middle-income countries.