Mortality after discharge from intensive care

doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7313.629

BMJ 2001;323:629 ( 15 September )

Letters

Mortality after discharge from intensive care

Only normalisation of physiology will reduce risk of mortality after discharge

Research in intensive care needs to find balance between scientific method and ethics

Only community debate on appropriate end of life care will limit ballooning budget

Only normalisation of physiology will reduce risk of mortality after discharge

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ The triage model described by Daly et al to identify patients at higher risk of death after discharge from intensivecare seeks to address a number of important issues.¹ Daly etal used five variables (patient's age, chronic health points,length of stay in intensive care, acute physiology score, andcardiothoracic surgery) to produce a predictive model that gavea relative risk of death of 9.44 in the developmental group (mortality14% in those at risk, 1.5% in those not at risk according to thismodel) and 6.76 in the validation group (mortality 28% in thoseat risk on day of discharge, 4% in those not at risk in the 48hours before discharge). This adds further statistical backgroundto previous studies, which had highlighted four of these variablesas risk factors at discharge from intensive care. ² ³ Thefifth variable, cardiothoracic surgery (57% of the developmentalmodel), makes this group . . . [Full text of this article]

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