-
The American surgeon · Oct 2015
An Early Warning Score Predicts Risk of Death after In-hospital Cardiopulmonary Arrest in Surgical Patients.
- Alexander P Stark, Robert C Maciel, William Sheppard, Greg Sacks, and O Joe Hines.
- Department of Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Am Surg. 2015 Oct 1; 81 (10): 916-21.
AbstractIn-hospital cardiopulmonary arrest can contribute significantly to publicly reported mortality rates. Systems to improve mortality are being implemented across all specialties. A review was conducted for all surgical patients >18 years of age who experienced a "Code Blue" event between January 1, 2013 and March 9, 2014 at a university hospital. A previously validated Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) using routine vital signs and neurologic status was calculated at regular intervals preceding the event. In 62 patients, the most common causes of arrest included respiratory failure, arrhythmia, sepsis, hemorrhage, and airway obstruction, but remained unknown in 27 per cent of cases. A total of 56.5 per cent of patients died before hospital discharge. In-hospital death was associated with American Society of Anesthesiologists status (P = 0.039) and acute versus elective admission (P = 0.003). Increasing MEWS on admission, 24 hours before the event, the event-day, and a maximum MEWS score on the day of the event increased the odds of death. Max MEWS remained associated with death after multivariate analysis (odds ratio 1.39, P = 0.025). Simple and easy to implement warning scores such as MEWS can identify surgical patients at risk of death after arrest. Such recognition may provide an opportunity for clinical intervention resulting in improved patient outcomes and hospital mortality rates.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.