Persistent Critical Illness Among Intensive Care Patients in India: A Registry-Embedded Cohort Study

Among patients admitted to an ICU in high-income countries, persistent critical illness arises when the admission diagnosis and acute physiologic derangements no longer predict outcomes better than antecedent characteristics. We evaluated this phenomenon in India.

Cohort study.

Fifty-six ICUs in India belonging to the Indian Registry of Intensive Care.

Adult critically ill patients.

None.

We evaluated associations of acute illness characteristics (admission diagnoses and acute physiology variables), antecedent characteristics (age, sex, and Charlson Comorbidity Index), and their combination on hospital mortality. Analyses used generalized mixed-effects models. In post hoc analyses, we compared patients with or without a long ICU stay. We included 42,925 patients; hospital mortality was 17.4%. Prognostic performance of acute illness characteristics declined over time (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUROC], 0.76 at admission; 0.69 at day 7) and was consistently poor for antecedent characteristics (AUROC, 0.56 at admission and day 7). Patients with ICU stay greater than 7 days were sicker (median [interquartile range (IQR)]; Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II, 14 [9, 19] vs. 10 [6, 15]; p < 0.001), with higher hospital mortality (33.1% vs. 14.6%; odds ratio, 2.17; 95% CI, 2.03-2.31) and ICU mortality (30.3% vs. 13.2%); receipt of invasive ventilation (51.7% vs. 19.5%), noninvasive ventilation (18.4% vs. 7.6%), vasopressors (34.7% vs. 19.1%), and kidney replacement therapy (11.4% vs. 6.1%) were all significantly higher among those staying in ICU greater than 7 days.

In this cohort of critically ill patients in India, as ICU stay increased, the prognostic performance of acute illness characteristics decreased whereas that of antecedent characteristics remained poor. Although patients with ICU stay greater than 7 days had higher mortality and received more organ support, the definition of persistent critical illness from high-income country cohorts was not replicated.