SAN ANTONIO – , according to an investigator who presented results of a large retrospective analysis.
Andrew Bowser/MDedge News
Dr. Zin Mar Htun
Liver disease increased the risk of intubation by 39% and increased length of stay by 1 day in the study, presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
These findings have implications for clinicians and the scoring systems they use to evaluate patients with pneumonia, according to investigator Zin Mar Htun, MD, internal medicine resident at Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital and Presence Saint Joseph Hospital, Chicago.
“We should recognize the importance of chronic liver disease as an independent risk factor for worse outcomes in pneumonia, regardless of the clinical findings or other coexisting comorbidities,” Dr. Htun said in a podium presentation.
Traditional scoring systems for evaluating pneumonia severity do not incorporate hepatic function status, she said.
“We need to come up with a better scoring system that recognizes comorbidities better than the Patient Safety Indicator scoring,” she told attendees at the meeting.
In their study, Dr. Htun and coinvestigator Muhammad Gul, MD, used the 2014 Nationwide Inpatient Sample database to look at pneumonia patients with or without a liver disease diagnosis.
Intubation was done in 14.2% of pneumonia patients with chronic liver disease present, compared with 10.6% of patients with no chronic liver disease (odds ratio [OR], 1.39; 95% confidence interval, 1.30-1.48) in one of their analyses, which included 17,528 pneumonia patients with a liver disease diagnosis and 17,528 pneumonia patients with no such diagnosis, propensity score-matched for age, gender, and Charlson comorbidities.
Length of stay was 8.76 and 7.83 days, respectively, for pneumonia patients with and without chronic liver disease (P less than .001), the propensity score-matched analysis further showed. In-hospital mortality was 10.5% and 6.9% for the liver disease and no liver disease groups in this analysis (OR, 1.57; 95% CI, 1.46-1.70).
In a regression analysis looking at 1.5 million pneumonia patients, of whom about 51,000 had chronic liver disease, the odds ratio for mortality was 1.82 (95% CI, 1.76-1.88; P less than .001), Dr. Htun further reported.
The pathogens causing pneumonia in patients with chronic liver disease were about the same as those in other hospitalized patients, she said in her presentation.
These are “compelling” results that suggest liver disease should considered as a factor in the development of future pneumonia scoring systems, according to Zachary Q. Morris, MD, of Henry Ford Hospital.
Creators of scoring systems may err on the side of making them “simplistic” so they are accessible and easy to analyze, Dr. Morris said in an interview.
“There comes a point in time that maybe you do need to have another layer of complexity to it,” added Dr. Morris, who moderated the original research session where Dr. Htun presented her results.
Both Dr. Htun and Dr. Gul reported that they had no relationships relevant to their study.
SOURCE: Htun ZM, et al. CHEST 2018. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2018.08.862.