OBJECTIVES:
In a population-based study, we examined time trends in chronic liver disease (CLD)-related hospitalizations in a large and diverse metroplex.
METHODS:
We examined all CLD-related inpatient encounters (2000–2015) in Dallas–Fort Worth (DFW) using data from the DFW council collaborative that captures claims data from 97% of all hospitalizations in DFW (10.7 million regional patients).
RESULTS:
There were 83,539 CLD-related hospitalizations in 48,580 unique patients across 84 hospitals. The age and gender standardized annual rate of CLD-related hospitalization increased from 48.9 per 100,000 in 2000 to 125.7 per 100,000 in 2014. Mean age at hospitalization increased from 54.0 (14.1) to 58.5 (13.5) years; the proportion of CLD patients above 65 years increased from 24.2% to 33.1%. HCV-related hospitalizations plateaued, whereas an increase was seen in hospitalizations related to alcohol (9.1 to 22.7 per 100,000) or fatty liver (1.4 per 100,000 to 19.5 per 100,000). The prevalence of medical comorbidities increased for CLD patients: coronary artery disease (4.8% to 14.3%), obesity (2.8% to 14.6%), chronic kidney disease (2.8% to 18.2%), and diabetes (18.0% to 33.2%). Overall hospitalizations with traditional complications of portal hypertension (ascites, varices, and peritonitis) remained stable over time. However, hospitalization with complications related to infection increased from 54.7% to 66.4%, and renal failure increased by sevenfold (2.7% to 19.5%).
CONCLUSIONS:
CLD-related hospitalizations have increased twofold over the last decade. Hospitalized CLD patients are older and sicker with multiple chronic conditions. Traditional complications of portal hypertension have been superseded by infection and renal failure, warranting a need to redefine what it means to have decompensated CLD.
Most organ procurement organization professionals and transplant surgeons intuitively know that meeting donor management goals improves organ allocation and transplant outcomes. In this era of evidence-based medicine, it is important to know whether the data support this assumption. All 6 organ procurement organizations in the United Network for Organ Sharing's region 10 agreed on 6 specific donor management goals. The organ procurement organizations then compared the number of organs transplanted per donor when goals were met with the number when goals were not met. Results were broken down by donor type: standard-criteria donation, expanded-criteria donation, and donation after cardiac death. For all 6 organ procurement organizations combined, the data for all of 2008 show a substantial and statistically significant improvement in number of organs transplanted per donor for standard criteria donation and total donors when goals are met, with a smaller degree of improvement (although not statistically significant) in the number of organs transplanted per donor for expanded-criteria donation and donation after cardiac death when goals are met.
These results demonstrate that the PMSIS has excellent discriminative ability to detect differences in groups that are known to differ in terms of clinical criteria. The PMSIS can be used to educate consumers about the impact of their symptoms on QOL.
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