Association of lactate-to-albumin ratio with in-hospital and intensive care unit mortality in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage

Oh fuck, you're predicting death. Do you tell your patients that?  Where is your intervention that will prevent that death? That is the research that is needed.

Association of lactate-to-albumin ratio with in-hospital and intensive care unit mortality in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage

Dongjie Wu^1,2†, Siyuan Shen^1,2† and Dongmei Luo^1,2*

• ¹Anhui University of Technology School of Microelectronics and Data Science, Ma’anshan, Anhui, China
• ²Anhui Provincial Joint Key Laboratory of Disciplines for Industrial Big Data Analysis and Intelligent Decision, Ma’anshan, Anhui, China

Background: Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a severe stroke subtype with a high mortality rate; the lactate-to-albumin ratio (LAR) is a new biomarker for predicting clinical outcomes in patients with ICH. However, the relationship between LAR and mortality in patients with ICH treated in the intensive care unit (ICU) remains controversial. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to investigate the association between LAR and in-hospital and ICU mortality in patients with ICH.

Methods: Patients with ICH were selected from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database; their clinical information, including baseline characteristics, vital signs, comorbidities, laboratory test results, and scoring systems, was extracted. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards analyses were used to investigate the association of LAR with in-hospital and ICU mortality. The maximum selection statistical method and subgroup analysis were used to investigate these relationships further. Kaplan–Meier (KM) analysis was used to draw survival curves.

Results: This study enrolled 237 patients with ICH whose lactate and albumin levels, with median values of 1.975 and 3.6 mg/dl, respectively, were measured within the first 24 h after ICU admission. LAR had an association with increased risk of in-hospital mortality [unadjusted hazards ratio (HR), 1.79; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.32–2.42; p < 0.001] and ICU mortality (unadjusted HR, 1.88; 95% CI, 1.38–2.55; p < 0.001). A cut-off value of 0.963 mg/dl was used to classify patients into high LAR (≥0.963) and low LAR (<0.963) groups, and survival curves suggested that those two groups had significant survival differences (p = 0.0058 and 0.0048, respectively). Furthermore, the high LAR group with ICH had a significantly increased risk of in-hospital and ICU mortality compared to the low LAR group.

Conclusion: Our study suggests that a high LAR is associated with an increased risk of in-hospital and ICU mortality in patients with ICH. Thus, the LAR is a useful prognostic predictor of clinical outcomes in patients with ICH.

How to Tell Patients They're Dying

 Do you really think your hospital has analyzed their 30 day death rate and come up with predictions of who will die? And then has the compassion to do this? Are they as bad as this?

Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter suffers stroke; full recovery expected

Oops! 

 Scott Carpenter - Obituary

The latest here:

How to Tell Patients They're Dying

A clear and humane approach is essential

by Shunichi Nakagawa, MD October 22, 2022

"Am I dying?"

The patient, a young woman in her 20s, looked at my face and asked me directly. The patient had been in the intensive care unit (ICU) for many weeks and had been sustained by multiple life-support treatments, including a breathing machine, continuous dialysis, and artificial nutrition.

Despite the Herculean efforts of the patient, her family, and the whole medical team, her condition didn't improve. It became obvious that she would not survive her hospital stay. She wanted to go home so badly, but it would never happen. She knew how sick she was, but she was not aware that she was dying. We scheduled a family meeting. We needed to tell her what was happening.

As her palliative care physician, I was leading the conversation. She could not talk, but she could express herself by writing on a whiteboard. With the help of my colleague, an ICU physician, I explained how sick she was and why she would not get better. I said, "As such, we have to tell you that...you will not be able to go home." That's when she wrote on her whiteboard, "Am I dying?" and looked straight at me.

This is a question physicians often face, yet it's also one that physicians are not good at answering.

Some physicians avoid answering directly by saying, "Well, we don't know for sure..." or "Doctors don't have a crystal ball." It is true we don't know for sure, but oftentimes, we do know to some extent. Maybe physicians have been trained to be afraid of saying something they cannot be sure is totally accurate. But to me, it is also unfair not to tell patients what you sort of know, only because you can't say it with complete certainty.

Another way to answer this question is by replying, "Why do you ask?" Patients may ask if they are dying for a variety of reasons. They could have uncontrolled pain, they may not understand how sick they really are, or they could have significant concerns about their family or job, among other things. If "Am I dying?" comes out of the blue, "Why do you ask?" is the perfect response because it allows you to explore the reason behind that question.

However, in my conversation with this particular patient, I had explained her dire medical condition and told her she would not be able to go home. In this context, "Why do you ask?" seemed like an odd question. It was clear she was asking because I had just told her she was too sick to go home.

This is a critical point in the conversation with patients who are seriously ill. As a medical professional, and as a palliative care physician who is deemed an expert in this kind of conversation, I need to give a direct answer to the patient's question. I need to convey this awful information as clearly and humanely as possible.

How should I respond?

I'm generally not comfortable answering, "Yes, you are dying" or "No, you are not," mainly because these responses may not be clear enough. In a sense, we are all dying and living at the same time. It depends on how you look at it. Instead, I prefer to say, "Well, your time seems to be getting shorter," because this is more objective and concrete. There is no room for subjective interpretation to cause misunderstanding. Oftentimes, patients respond with "What do you mean? How short is it?"

The following are my responses when they ask me how much time is left.

"Do you want to know?" I first need to get the patient's permission to give this critical information. Some patients, even after they ask, change their minds and say, "No, don't tell me that." Also, if there are multiple family members in the room, one of them may not want to hear the answer. We cannot force the information on somebody who doesn't want it. This is a critical point: if the patient doesn't ask me "How short is it?" I explicitly ask for permission by saying, "I just said time is getting short. Do you want to know how short it is?"

I'll generally add: "We cannot give you the exact number, but we can give you our best guess based on our experience." I want to emphasize the uncertainty of prognostication.

"When I answer this question, I will answer with a range of time, like hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to months, months to years." I want to prepare the patient for how this information is delivered.

"In your case, it is probably...days to weeks..." This is the punch line. I intentionally speak very slowly with lots of pauses before and after "days to weeks."

Then I'll ask, "Are you surprised to hear this?" This question is useful for two reasons. For one, it addresses the patient's emotion by naming it, and second, it gauges how they received the news. Most patients will say "Yes. I am...," which means I need to slow down and continue to address their emotion. But some will say "No. I kind of knew..." In this case, they are more ready to talk about the next step and I can advance the conversation.

My approach to this conversation was developed by looking toward my mentors and based on my own experience, including much trial and error. To me, this is the clearest and most humane approach. I practice this conversation myself and teach my trainees how to do it.

It almost always satisfies the patient's need for greater clarity -- but with this particular patient, it didn't. After I told her she had days to weeks to live, she again asked me, "Am I dying?" I started to get nervous. The way I told her could not have been clearer. I saw that her family at the bedside received the message. I repeated it even more slowly with an abbreviated version, "Well, your time is getting shorter...in the range of days to weeks..." Again, she asked me, "Am I dying?"

Another reason I'm uncomfortable with answering "yes" or "no" is because of how the "D-word" sounds to patients. There are some clinicians who say death and dying are not dirty words, so we should not be afraid to say it. I agree, but at the same time, I also think we should be mindful of how and when we say it. The purpose of communication with our patients is to convey what is happening to them and make sure they understand. Physicians should be clear enough and use the D-word if needed. But I feel it does not have to be said or repeated unnecessarily, as long as the patient understands what you mean.

Having said that, in this case, my usual approach clearly was not working. I had to say the D-word. I awkwardly answered, "Yes...You are dying...Slowly..." It finally penetrated. She said, "I see."

Shunichi Nakagawa, MD, is director of inpatient palliative care services and an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.

Scientists Found a Way to Predict Your Death by How You Walk

Now to do this test on stroke survivors.  My walking is still screwed up due to spasticity and there in NO ONE IN THE WORLD THAT KNOWS ONE DAMN THING ABOUT FIXING IT!

Scientists Found a Way to Predict Your Death by How You Walk

We’re all going to die eventually—but what if you knew when you’d be at risk for dropping dead, based solely on the way you walk? A new study shows that measurements taken with wrist-worn motion sensors can be used to predict one’s mortality risk up to five years later. As one of the largest validations of wearable technology to date, the research raises the possibility of one day using the motion detection system in smartphones to survey patient health without the need for in-person visits to the doctor’s office.

The study, published Thursday in the journal PLOS Digital Health, was run using data from over 100,000 Britons from the massive UK Biobank project, which began collecting health and biometric information from participants in 2006 and will follow them for another 14 years. From a week of wrist sensor data, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed a model that pares down a person’s acceleration and the distance they traveled into six-minute chunks. According to study author Bruce Schatz, a University of Illinois computer science researcher, the scientists chose this duration to mimic the six-minute walk test: a measurement of heart and lung function commonly taken during a medical appointment that tasks participants with walking at a normal pace for six minutes and compares their total distance traveled to benchmarks according to their age.

A Gold-Coated Sensor Could Reshape Cancer Drug Discovery

The test is “a very good external measure of what's going on internally,” and could easily be replicated using the accelerometer present in a wrist sensor or a cheap phone, Schatz told The Daily Beast. “I know for a fact that these kinds of models will work with cheap phones.”

Predictions of future death made by the researchers’ model were correct 72 percent of the time after one year, and 73 percent after five years—a similar rate of accuracy found in a study published last year that analyzed the same data set but used hours, rather than minutes, of data. This new study, argued Schatz, is a more promising demonstration of passive monitoring technology like phone and wrist sensors as his team’s model requires less data and affords a great degree of privacy to the user.

“If you record all of the data, it's true that people have characteristic walks and you can tell who the individual is. But it's totally possible to take part of the signal, which is good enough to do the vitals but completely disguises who the person is,” he said.

Even so, using everyday technology to passively monitor patients could raise issues if users cannot give continuous informed consent, situations which could be complicated by degenerative illnesses or a lack of technological literacy. These ethical issues, said Schatz, are still speculative, but deserve coordinated thought from scientists as the research moves forward.

While the sensors used in the study were near-identical to the ones in both simple cell phones and smartphones, future work should validate this model in a large sample when users carry phones in their pockets, rather than wear sensors on their wrists. Downloading an app that can measure your health as you go about your day-to-day could be a convenient and painless way to keep people healthier, longer.

“If you want to raise the general health of the entire population, this kind of project is really important,” Schatz said.