Analysis of serum albumin levels in elderly neurocritical patients after surgery / 中华急诊医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To further optimize the nutritional support program for elderly neurocritical patients, analyze the changes and influencing factors of serum albumin levels in elderly neurocritical patients after surgery, and explore the impact on prognosis.Methods:A retrospective cohort study was conducted to investigate the medical records of neurosurgical intensive patients in Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital from May 2015 to September 2019. All the patients were treated for at least 5 days after operation. Patients with severe liver and kidney dysfunction, mental illness and incomplete medical records were not included in the study. Patients aged ≥65 years were included as the experimental group and patients aged <65 years served as the control group. Generalized estimating equation and other models were used to analyze the difference in the trend of albumin level and its influencing factors between the two groups. Automated machine learning was used to explore the influence of factors such as albumin level, nutrition mode, age, sex, diagnosis, preoperative consciousness level on the prognosis of patients.Results:A total of 284 patients were included in the study, including 85 in the experimental group and 199 in the control group. There were no significant differences in baseline data such as sex, age, and proportion of nutritional patterns between the two groups. Generalized estimating equation and generalized mixed additive equation showed that albumin level in both groups reached the minimum on the 3rd day after operation, and the average level in the experimental group was significantly lower than that in the control group ( P=0.03). Cerebral hemorrhage, emergency surgery, and low preoperative albumin were risk factors ( P<0.05); intravenous supplementation of human albumin might have an adverse effect on the experimental group ( P = 0.047). Machine learning models suggested that the higher the serum albumin level at discharge, the better the prognosis at 1 month after surgery. The area under ROC curve was 0.906, the specificity was 93.7%, and the sensitivity was 67.0%. Conclusions:The changes of albumin level in elderly patients with neurological critical illness after surgery are basically the same as those in young patients, with the lowest albumin level on the 3rd day after surgery, and the albumin levels even lower on the 3rd day after surgery in patients with cerebral hemorrhage, emergency surgery and preoperative low albumin. The higher the albumin level at discharge, the better the prognosis of patients may be.