Association between borderline dysnatremia and mortality insight into a new data mining approach

Even small variations of serum sodium concentration may be associated with mortality. Our objective was to confirm the impact of borderline dysnatremia for patients admitted to hospital on in-hospital mortality using real life care data from our electronic health record (EHR) and a phenome-wide association analysis (PheWAS).

Retrospective observational study based on patient data admitted to Hôpital Européen George Pompidou, between 01/01/2008 and 31/06/2014; including 45,834 patients with serum sodium determinations on admission. We analyzed the association between dysnatremia and in-hospital mortality, using a multivariate logistic regression model to adjust for classical potential confounders. We performed a PheWAS to identify new potential confounders.

Hyponatremia and hypernatremia were recorded for 12.0% and 1.0% of hospital stays, respectively. Adjusted odds ratios (ORa) for severe, moderate and borderline hyponatremia were 3.44 (95% CI, 2.41-4.86), 2.48 (95% CI, 1.96-3.13) and 1.98 (95% CI, 1.73-2.28), respectively. ORa for severe, moderate and borderline hypernatremia were 4.07 (95% CI, 2.92-5.62), 4.42 (95% CI, 2.04-9.20) and 3.72 (95% CI, 1.53-8.45), respectively. Borderline hyponatremia (ORa = 1.57 95% CI, 1.35-1.81) and borderline hypernatremia (ORa = 3.47 95% CI, 2.43-4.90) were still associated with in-hospital mortality after adjustment for classical and new confounding factors identified through the PheWAS analysis.

Borderline dysnatremia on admission are independently associated with a higher risk of in-hospital mortality. By using medical data automatically collected in EHR and a new data mining approach, we identified new potential confounding factors that were highly associated with both mortality and dysnatremia.