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In a recent article in Emergency Medicine Journal, Zaboli et al 1 used a 13-month cohort of patients presenting to a large emergency department in Italy to examine the ability of the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) as well as NEWS without systolic blood pressure (NEWS-SBP) to predict 48-hour, 7-day and 30-day mortality. The authors note that SBP can be a more time-consuming metric to measure than other vital signs included in NEWS (eg, heart rate, respiratory rate). As a result, a NEWS score computed without SBP could prove clinically useful in busy hospital settings. The authors deployed an elegant design, in which both NEWS and NEWS-SBP were used to predict mortality in each patient, along with a large sample size (n=26 249). The authors used the method by DeLong et al 2 to report a statistically non-significant difference between the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUROCs) for NEWS and NEWS-SBP when predicting 48-hour mortality, but significant differences for 7-day and 30-day mortality and for several patient subgroups across each mortality timeframe.