Prevalence of overt gastrointestinal bleeding in intensive care unit patients and it's association with mortality and duration of admission

Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluation of prevalence of overt gastrointestinal bleeding in intensive care unit patients and it's association with mortality and duration of admission. Materials and Methods: This study was cross-sectional study and performed on all patients admitted to the intensive care units of Imam Reza Hospital during 1 year in 2020. In this study, 277 patients were studied. The sampling method in this study was census. In this study, the independent variable is the presence or absence of bleeding and the dependent variables are the number of hospitalization days and the mortality rate in the ICU. The prevalence of overt gastrointestinal bleeding in ICU patients was estimated and also the number of hospitalization days and mortality rates in the group with overt bleeding were compared with those without overt bleeding. Confounding variables including age, underlying disease, and drugs used were collected, which were adjusted their effect on correlation analysis using statistical methods. Results: In this study, the prevalence of overt gastrointestinal bleeding was 82 cases of 570 cases (14.1%). The mean (standard deviation) of age in the two groups of patients with overt gastrointestinal bleeding and without overt gastrointestinal bleeding were 68.0 (54.5-76.5) and 65.0 (46.0-73.0) years, respectively. None of the variables of age and gender were statistically significant difference between the two groups of patients with overt gastrointestinal bleeding and without overt gastrointestinal bleeding (P-value> 0.05). Also, among the variables of duration of ICU hospitalization, number of drugs prescribed in ICU and mortality in the subjects, prescription of pantoprazole in the ICU (P-value = 0.005) and mortality (P-value = 0.029) in the group of patients with overt gastrointestinal bleeding was significantly higher than the group of patients without overt gastrointestinal bleeding. Among the variables included in the logistic regression model, the variables of prescription of pantoprazole in ICU (P-value = 0.014) and mortality (P-value = 0.012) by adjusting for variables of demographic, length of hospital stay, number of ICU medications and underlying diseases, their chance in patients admitted to the intensive care unit with apparent gastrointestinal bleeding were significantly 5.875 and 8.328 times, respectively. Overt gastrointestinal bleeding in patients admitted to the intensive care unit did not have significant power in predicting the duration of ICU hospitalization (P-value> 0.05).