Half of patients admitted to an emergency department for sepsis died within two years

In a recent study, half of all patients with sepsis admitted to an emergency department died within two years, but the predictive ability of a model was poor, according to a study presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress, held Oct. 12 to 16 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Osama Bin Abdullah, M.D., Ph.D., from Slagelse Hospital in Denmark, and colleagues examined long-term all-cause mortality and predictors for mortality in a prospective study of adult patients admitted to an emergency department with sepsis. The analysis included 2,110 patients with suspected infections.

The researchers found that during a median follow-up of two years, 50.6% of patients died. An increased risk for mortality was independently associated with age (hazard ratio [HR], 1.04; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.03 to 1.05), a history of cancer (HR, 2.21; 95% CI, 1.70 to 2.87), ischemic heart disease (HR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.05 to 1.85), dementia (HR, 1.90; 95% CI, 1.41 to 2.57), and previous admission with sepsis (HR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.19 to 1.84) within the last six months before the index admission. The best fit was produced by a model without age (Harrel’s C = 0.488).

“Although we identified several risk factors that clearly increased the risk of death and should provide a focus for clinicians and researchers during the discharge planning process, as well as for developing future prediction studies, we were unable to construct an overall model suitable for predicting mortality in clinical practice,” co-author Finn E. Nielsen, M.D., D.M.Sc., from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, said in a statement.

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