Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
Background: Patients undergoing major surgery are at risk of complications, so-called serious adverse events (SAE). Continuous monitoring may detect deteriorating patients by recording abnormal vital signs. We aimed to assess the association between abnormal vital signs inspired by Early Warning Score thresholds and subsequent SAEs in patients undergoing major abdominal surgery.Methods: Prospective observational cohort study continuously monitoring heart rate, respiratory rate, peripheral oxygen saturation, and blood pressure for up to 96 h in 500 postoperative patients admitted to the general ward. Exposure variables were vital sign abnormalities, primary outcome was any serious adverse event occurring within 30 postoperative days. The primary analysis investigated the association between exposure variables per 24 h and subsequent serious adverse events.Results: Serious adverse events occurred in 37% of patients, with 38% occurring during monitoring. Among patients with SAE during monitoring, the median duration of vital sign abnormalities was 272 min (IQR 110-447), compared to 259 min (IQR 153-394) in patients with SAE after monitoring and 261 min (IQR 132-468) in the patients without any SAE (p = .62 for all three group comparisons). Episodes of heart rate ≥110 bpm occurred in 16%, 7.1%, and 3.9% of patients in the time before SAE during monitoring, after monitoring, and without SAE, respectively (p < .002). Patients withThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.