A widened pulse pressure: a potential valuable prognostic indicator of mortality in patients with sepsis

Exploring the relationship between admission pulse pressure and clinical features in patients with spontaneous supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage

Elevated pulse pressure is commonly observed in cardiovascular diseases and serves as an independent risk factor and predictor of cardiac mortality. However, the role of pulse pressure in patients with spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) remains uncertain. This study aimed to investigate the association between admission pulse pressure and clinical characteristics, including in-hospital outcomes, in ICH patients. We retrospectively analyzed the data of 292 ICH patients, categorizing them into two groups based on admission wide pulse pressure: > 100 mmHg (n = 60) and ≤ 100 mmHg (n = 232). Clinical characteristics and in-hospital outcomes were compared between the groups, and multivariate logistic regression was performed to identify independent factors. Patients with wide pulse pressure were older, had lower Glasgow Coma Scale, larger intraparenchymal hematomas, more pronounced midline shifts, and higher rates of intraventricular hematoma extension and hydrocephalus. These patients also experienced higher frequencies of craniotomy or craniectomy and longer hospital stays. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that pulse pressure > 100 mmHg was significantly associated with increased in-hospital mortality (odds ratio 4.31, 95% confidence interval 1.12-16.62, p = 0.03), but not with a modified Rankin Scale score of 4-6. In conclusion, our investigation demonstrates a significant relationship between admission pulse pressure and severe clinical characteristics in ICH patients. Importantly, a wider pulse pressure is linked to heightened in-hospital mortality. These results underscore the necessity for customized strategies to predict patient outcomes in this population. Further research is essential to explore potential therapeutic interventions targeting pulse pressure to improve clinical outcomes for ICH patients.

Autonomic Testing Optimizes Therapy for Heart Failure and Related Cardiovascular Disorders

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Cardiovascular autonomic control is an intricately balanced dynamic process. Autonomic dysfunction, regardless of origin, promotes and sustains the disease processes, including in patients with heart failure (HF). Autonomic control is mediated through the two autonomic branches: parasympathetic and sympathetic (P&S). HF is arguably the disease that stands to most benefit from P&S manipulation to reduce mortality risk. This review article briefly summarizes some of the more common types of autonomic dysfunction (AD) that are found in heart failure, suggests a mechanism by which AD may contribute to HF, reviews AD involvement in common HF co-morbidities (e.g., ventricular arrhythmias, AFib, hypertension, and Cardiovascular Autonomic Neuropathy), and summarizes possible therapy options for treating AD in HF.

RECENT FINDINGS

Autonomic assessment is important in diagnosing and treating CHF, and its possible co-morbidities. Autonomic assessment may also have importance in predicting which patients may be susceptible to sudden cardiac death. This is important since most CHF patients with sudden cardiac death have preserved left ventricular ejection fraction and better discriminators are needed. Many life-threatening cardiovascular disorders will require invasive testing for precise diagnoses and therapy planning when modulating the ANS is important. In cases of non-life-threatening disorders, non-invasive ANS testing techniques, especially those that individually assess both ANS branches simultaneously and independently, are sufficient to diagnose and treat serially.

Pulse pressure during the initial resuscitative period in patients with septic shock treated with a protocol-driven resuscitation bundle therapy

BACKGROUND/AIMS

Maintaining a mean arterial pressure (MAP) ≥ 65 mmHg during septic shock should be based on individual circumstances, but specific target is poorly understood. We investigated associations between time-weighted average (TWA) hemodynamic parameters during the initial resuscitative period and 28-day mortality.

METHODS

Prospectively collected data were obtained from a septic shock patient registry, according to the Sepsis-3 definition, between 2016 and 2018. The TWA systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, MAP, shock index, and pulse pressure (PP) during the first 6 hours after shock recognition were compared. Multivariable regression analysis was performed to assess associations between these parameters and 28-day mortality.

RESULTS

Of 340 patients with septic shock, 92 died. Only the median TWA PP differed between the survivors and non-survivors (39.2 mmHg vs. 43.0 mmHg, p = 0.020), whereas the other indexes did not. When PP was divided into quartiles (< 34, 34 to 40, 40 to 48, and > 48 mmHg), the mortality rate was higher in the highest quartile (41.2%). Multivariable logistic analysis revealed that PP (odds ratio [OR], 1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.012 to 1.622; p = 0.039) and PP of > 48 mmHg (OR, 2.25; 95% CI, 1.272 to 3.981; p = 0.005) were independently associated with 28-day mortality.

CONCLUSION

PP was significantly associated with 28-day mortality in patients with septic shock and MAP maintained at > 65 mmHg during the first 6 hours. Further studies are warranted to optimize strategies for maintaining PP and MAP at > 65 mmHg during the early resuscitative period.

Feature Engineering for ICU Mortality Prediction Based on Hourly to Bi-Hourly Measurements

Mortality prediction for intensive care unit (ICU) patients is a challenging problem that requires extracting discriminative and informative features. This study presents a proof of concept for exploring features that can provide clinical insight. Through a feature engineering approach, it is attempted to improve ICU mortality prediction in field conditions with low frequently measured data (i.e., hourly to bi-hourly). Features are explored by investigating the vital signs measurements of ICU patients, labelled with mortality or survival at discharge. The vital signs of interest in this study are heart and respiration rate, oxygen saturation and blood pressure. The latter comprises systolic, diastolic and mean arterial pressure. In the feature exploration process, it is aimed to extract simple and interpretable features that can provide clinical insight. For this purpose, a classifier is required that maximises the margin between the two classes (i.e., survival and mortality) with minimum tolerance to misclassification errors. Moreover, it preferably has to provide a linear decision surface in the original feature space without mapping to an unlimited dimensionality feature space. Therefore, a linear hard margin support vector machine (SVM) classifier is suggested. The extracted features are grouped in three categories: statistical, dynamic and physiological. Each category plays an important role in enhancing classification error performance. After extracting several features within the three categories, a manual feature fine-tuning is applied to consider only the most efficient features. The final classification, considering mortality as the positive class, resulted in an accuracy of 91.56 % , sensitivity of 90.59 % , precision of 86.52 % and F 1 -score of 88.50 % . The obtained results show that the proposed feature engineering approach and the extracted features are valid to be considered and further enhanced for the mortality prediction purpose. Moreover, the proposed feature engineering approach moved the modelling methodology from black-box modelling to grey-box modelling in combination with the powerful classifier of SVMs.

Pulse Pressure and Mortality Risk in Critically Ill Patients

BACKGROUND

Pulse pressure is a hemodynamic variable easily measured in the intensive care unit.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate whether pulse pressure is an independent risk factor for mortality in intensive care unit patients.

METHODS

A retrospective cohort study was carried out in Brazil. Data were collected from medical records of patients admitted to intensive care units from September to December 2012. Pulse pressure was calculated from systolic and diastolic blood pressures recorded during the first 24 hours of stay.

RESULTS

Records of 529 patients (mean [standard deviation] age 55.0 [17.3] years; 54.4% male, 45.6% female) were analyzed. Risk factors for mortality were age, use of vasoactive drugs, nursing workload, and length of stay in the intensive care unit. Analysis indicated that higher minimum pulse pressures were associated with lower mortality risk.

CONCLUSION

Pulse pressure was not found to be an independent risk factor for mortality in patients who are critically ill.

A novel method to quantify arterial pulse waveform morphology: attractor reconstruction for physiologists and clinicians

Current arterial pulse monitoring systems capture data at high frequencies (100-1000 Hz). However, they typically report averaged or low frequency summary data such as heart rate and systolic, mean and diastolic blood pressure. In doing so, a potential wealth of information contained in the high-fidelity waveform data is discarded, data which has long been known to contain useful information on cardiovascular performance. Here we summarise a new mathematical method, attractor reconstruction, which enables the quantification of arterial waveform shape and variability in real-time. The method can handle long streams of non-stationary data and does not require preprocessing of the raw physiological data by the end user. Whilst the detailed mathematical proofs have been described elsewhere (Aston et al 2008 Physiol. Meas. 39), the authors were motivated to write a summary of the method and its potential utility for biomedical researchers, physiologists and clinician readers. Here we illustrate how this new method may supplement and potentially enhance the sensitivity of detecting cardiovascular disturbances, to aid with biomedical research and clinical decision making.

Elevated Pulse Pressure Levels Are Associated With Increased In-Hospital Mortality in Acute Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage

OBJECTIVES

Clinical outcome after intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) remains poor. Definitive phase-3 trials in ICH have failed to demonstrate improved outcomes with intensive systolic blood pressure (SBP) lowering. We sought to determine whether other BP parameters-diastolic BP (DBP), pulse pressure (PP), and mean arterial pressure (MAP)-showed an association with clinical outcome in ICH.

METHODS

We retrospectively analyzed a prospective cohort of 672 patients with spontaneous ICH and documented demographic characteristics, stroke severity, and neuroimaging parameters. Consecutive hourly BP recordings allowed for computation of SBP, DBP, PP, and MAP. Threshold BP values that transitioned patients from survival to death were determined from ROC curves. Using in-hospital mortality as outcome, BP parameters were evaluated with multivariable logistic regression analysis.

RESULTS

Patients who died during hospitalization had higher mean PP compared to survivors (68.5 ± 16.4 mm Hg vs. 65.4 ± 12.4 mm Hg; P = 0.032). The following admission variables were associated with significantly higher in-hospital mortality (P < 0.001): poorer admission clinical condition, intraventricular hemorrhage, and increased admission normalized hematoma volume. ROC analysis showed that mean PP dichotomized at 72.17 mm Hg, provided a transition point that maximized sensitivity and specific for mortality. The association of this increased dichotomized PP with higher in-hospital mortality was maintained in multivariable logistic regression analysis (odds ratio, 3.0; 95% confidence interval, 1.7-5.3; P < 0.001) adjusting for potential confounders.

CONCLUSION

Widened PP may be an independent predictor for higher mortality in ICH. This association requires further study.