The association of older age and outcome with prolonged ICU stay was investigated in a cohort of 11,395 cardiac surgery patients by Ettema et al. [19] . The authors were able to demonstrate that all three major currently applied prediction models for outcome-the Parsonnet model, the Huijskes model and the EuroSCORE-showed poor calibration with age [70 and decreasing discrimination, which was worst for age [80 (AUCs were 0.68, 0.69 and 0.64, respectively). Obviously, outcome and recovery in older patients is rather more dependent on their general condition than on the conventional parameters used for scoring systems.