Fig. 1

Past and present risk stratification in CS. + Severity staging pyramid adopted from Society of Cardiovascular Angiography & Intervention (SCAI) [12]. Historically the management of cardiogenic shock (CS) has focussed on the normalisation of haemodynamic and biochemical parameters. As such, early research has compared the optimal modality to achieve this i.e. pharmacotherapy versus mechanical circulatory support. More recently, investigators have aimed phenotype patients into risk categories using both clinical parameters and measurements of inflammatory mediators to define severity of shock or risk of death