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The following is a summary of “Association of a frailty index derived from laboratory tests and vital signs with clinical outcomes in critical care patients with septic shock: a retrospective study based on the MIMIC-IV database,” published in the June 2024 issue of Infectious Disease by Ding et al.

Frailty is a decline in the body’s ability to handle physiological reserve, making individuals more susceptible to negative health outcomes. The laboratory-based frailty index (FI-Lab) helps assess this condition.

Researchers conducted a retrospective study investigating whether FI-Lab scores could predict in-hospital mortality among patients diagnosed with septic shock.

They utilized Baseline data from the Critical Care Medicine Database (MIMIC-IV, v2.2) for ICU patients with sepsis. The primary focus was on mortality during hospitalization. Propensity score matching (PSM) was applied to compare hospitalization conditions. Logistic regression analyzed the association between the FI-Lab and in-hospital mortality. The relationship was depicted using a restricted cubic spline (RCS)—Kaplan-Meier (KM) curves compared to survival rates. Subgroup analyses were conducted to enhance result reliability.

The results showed that of 9,219 patients, 1,803 matched patients were created after PSM. Analyses indicated that non-surviving ICU patients with septic shock had a high FI-Lab index (P<0.001). Both continuous and categorical use of FI-Lab correlated with increasing FI-Lab and higher in-hospital mortality (P<0.001). Subgroup analyses yielded similar results. The RCS illustrated this non-linear relationship and KM analysis revealed significantly lower cumulative survival time with increasing FI-Lab (log-rank test, P<0.001).

Investigators concluded that higher FI-Lab scores were linked to a greater risk of death within the hospital for patients with septic shock.

Source: bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-024-09430-w