Elderly patients with multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) have a higher mortality during hospitalization in the intensive care unit (ICU). Elderly patients often suffer from malnutrition. On the basis of the MIMIC-III database, this study analyzed the effect of the baseline nutritional status on the death of elderly patients with MODS during hospitalization.
Elderly patients with MODS were screened out from MIMIC-III 1.4 database. The geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI) was calculated and used to group patients into: normal nutrition (GNRI > 98) and malnutrition (GNRI ≤ 98) groups. The malnutrition group was divided into mild (92–98), moderate (82–91), and severe (≤81) groups. The differences in the baseline data and the incidence of adverse events between groups were compared. The GAM model was used to determine whether a curve relationship was present between the hospital death of elderly patients with MODS and GNRI and analyze the threshold saturation effect. The multivariate logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratio (OR) of in-hospital deaths in different GNRI groups. The interaction test was performed to find subgroups with differences.
A total of 2456 elderly patients with MODS were enrolled. A total of 1,273 (51.8%) and 1183 (48.2%) patients were in the normal nutrition and malnutrition groups, respectively. The mortality rate of patients in the normal nutrition group during hospitalization was lower than that in the malnutrition group (206/1273 vs. 292/1183, X2 = 27.410,
GNRI is related to the severity of illness in elderly patients with MODS. At GNRI < 92, moderate to severe malnutrition increases the risk of death in elderly patients with MODS during hospitalization.