This study was aimed at the adjustment and cross-validation of a prognostic score for burned children on hospital admission. DEMI score assesses 7 risk factors related to 4 main topics: Depth (% of partial and full thickness burnt area), extention (% of total body surface area (TBSA) burnt and injury to dorso-gluteal area), morbidity on admission (preexisting illness and complications due to inadequate referal) and presence of inhalation syndrome. These items were selected in a pervious case-control study using bivariate analysis on an estimation sample of 168 children with acute burns admitted to the Hospital de Pediatria “Juan P. Garrahan” between July 1991 and October 1993. The present study uses the same retrospective sample to adjust this score by means of multivariate analysis. Only 4 items were included in the logistic regression formula:% TBSA burnt, inadequate transfer, inhalation syndrome and dorso-gluteal affection. Resulting abreviation of DEMI score was then cross-validated on a perspective validation sample of 137 patients, yielding high correlation with the outcome (R=0.78) and high sensitivity(80.95%), specificity (96.55%), positive (80.55%) and negative (96.55%) predictive values. We conclude that this new DEMI score is an accurate tool to predict mortality risk in burnt children.