Survival and Quality of Life after a Long-Term Intensive Care Stay

Abstract

Long-term treatment of critically ill patients is admittedly burdened with high in-hospital and follow-up mortality. However, the excellent physical and psychological recovery of survivors unequivocally supports the employment of all technical and personnel resources within modern intensive care medicine.

Quality of Life in Relation to Length of Intensive Care Unit Stay After Cardiac Surgery

“…The other 16 studies were retrospective (Table 3). 3,7,9,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] The retrospective studies included 1,438 patients. Two studies were prospective and included 100 patients.…”

“…In 8 studies, the definition of prolonged ICU stay was >5 days. 3,26,27,29,32,33,36,37 The next most common definition was >7 days, reported in 7 studies. 4,9,25,30,31,34,36 Two studies considered ≥2 days in the ICU as prolonged.…”

“…Two studies 26,32 reported that 78% of survivors had a good functional, physical, and mental outcome. Conversely, Gaudino et al 4 reported a poor outcome in patients after a prolonged ICU stay (>10 days), although this was a prospective study.…”

“…Of these, 4 studies showed mortality was higher in patients with prolonged ICU stay. 27,30,32,36 One study demonstrated statistically significant differences in mortality at 2 years between prolonged and shorter ICU stays but not at 3 years. 35 In addition, these studies reported that good QOL outcomes were achievable in patients with prolonged ICU stay at a high financial cost.…”

Intensive Care Unit Stay of More than 14 Days after Cardiac Surgery is Associated with Non-cardiac Organ Failure

“…Our previous study compared the long-term survival of cardiac surgery patients whose ICU stay was > 3 days with those whose stay was ≤ 3 days, and showed that survival was significantly lower in the prolonged ICU stay group (66% versus 91%). Another study by Isgro et al 25 compared 5-year survival in cardiac surgery patients whose ICU stay was either > 5 days or ≤ 5 days, and showed a significantly decreased survival rate in the patients with a longer ICU stay (43% versus 78%, respectively). Bashour et al 4 followed 142 patients for periods of 1 and 2 years after an ICU stay ≥ 10 days and noted survival rates of 45% and 38%, respectively.…”