Showing papers on "APACHE II published in 1987"

Gastrointestinal dysfunction among intensive care unit patients.

Abstract: This study used the Acute Physiological and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE II) system to select two groups of ICU patients with comparable risk of hospital death to evaluate the importance of GI dysfunction, defined as failure to tolerate enteral nutrition (EN), as a prognostic factor. In our ICU, patients who have not undergone recent bowel surgery are treated by EN. Those patients who cannot tolerate EN are treated by total parenteral nutrition (TPN). One hundred and eleven patients who tolerated EN (functioning gut) and 97 TPN patients who failed to tolerate EN (GI dysfunction) were studied. The mean APACHE II scores of the two groups were 17.7 +/- 6.5 (SD) and 17.7 +/- 5.1, respectively. The observed mortality of patients with GI dysfunction (51%) was significantly higher (p less than .0005) than that of patients with a functioning gut (25%). This was associated with significantly poorer APACHE II mean BP, oxygenation, and creatinine scores among the GI dysfunction patients. Our results suggest that shock, ischemia, and hypoxemia, in addition to causing impairment of renal function, may bring about changes in the GI tract, evident clinically only as a failure to tolerate EN, which have an adverse effect on the prognosis of ICU patients so affected.

One year's experience with the APACHE II severity of disease classification system in a general intensive care unit

Abstract: The APACHE II sickness score was applied prospectively for one year in a general intensive care unit in Saudi Arabia. Two hundred and ten patients were studied, 66 of whom died in hospital. The mean APACHE II score of survivors was 11 (SD 7.1) and of non-survivors, 25.3 (SD 8.8). The mean Risk of Death was 13.3% (SD 13.1) for the survivors and 47.2% (SD 25.8) for non-survivors. The differences in APACHE score and Risk of Death between survivors and non-survivors are highly significant (p less than 0.0005 for both). No patient survived who had a Risk of Death greater than 60% and none died with a Risk of Death less than 7%. The sensitivity of the APACHE II system in predictions of death can be improved if the scores on the day of admission and on the 3rd day are taken into account.

Evaluation of sepsis in a critically ill surgical population.

Abstract: We report a new clinical rating system which assesses septic patients' ongoing disease course and its severity. Our system incorporates the Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System (TISS) and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation to measure discrete organ system abnormalities, plus a multiple system organ failure scale to quantify the number of abnormal organ systems. The resulting score, which reflects the severity of multiple organ dysfunction and grades responsiveness to therapy, was validated against the actual disease course. Retrospective and prospective profiles of individual surgical ICU patients demonstrated that this tracking method was a more effective indicator of severity of sepsis and more sensitive to the day-to-day changes in clinical status than either the TISS or APACHE II components alone. We also demonstrate that a graphic illustration of daily system scores yields clinically useful information relevant to the patients' septic course.

Thickness unto death

Abstract: To the Editor.— Two generic scoring systems are commonly used to quantitatively assess the severity of illness of intensive care unit (ICU) patients. These scoring systems are based on either physiological or therapeutic indexes.1-3As part of a retrospective study of ICU patients, we assessed their illness severity using both systems. For each of 302 patients (103 with cardiac arrest, 199 with no cardiac arrest), we calculated a patient classification system (PCS) score. This score is used by some hospitals to measure the amount of nursing care required per patient and is a modification of a therapeutic intervention scoring system.1To validate the PCS score, a stratified random sample of 62 patients (26 with cardiac arrest, 36 with no cardiac arrest) was scored with the APACHE II, a physiologically based illness scoring system that has been shown to be a valid predictor of risk of death in ICU