This article was chosen based on one of my presented cases in which the patient presented with McBurney’s point tenderness. The authors of this article try to come up with a clinical score to better help clinicians predict whether or not older male children are afflicted with appendicitis or not. They tried to achieve this by recruiting a total of 2,625 patients with suspected appendicitis from 9 pediatric emergency departments. Out of the total 961 patients were males aged 8-18. The mean age of the total population was 12.2 years and 49.9% had appendicitis. The other results that were reported consisted of 22.3% of patients having a perforation. Whether or not the patient had appendicitis the overall imaging rates were 68.8% and 84.4%, respectively. The most important clinical factors that were narrowed down consisted of having maximal tenderness in RLQ, pain with walking/coughing or hopping, having a absolute neutrophil count. The authors found that if a patient had a score of 8.1 or greater, they had a sensitivity of 25% and specificity of 98% and a PPV of 93% for ruling in appendicitis. Even though this score does not seem to be very sensitive it does hope to kick start the research into more specific and sensitive scoring criteria for assisting in ruling in or out appendicitis in older male children.

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