Intensive care unit length of stay beyond the first week and 1-year mortality - dutch single centre study in unselected critically ill patients describing long-term survival according to length of stay in conjunction with age

Methods All consecutive patients admitted to the ICU of the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands between July 2009 and April 2013 were included in the study. For patients with multiple ICU admissions we only included their first admission. Data on patient characteristics were prospectively gathered according to APACHE IV definitions.[2] Survival was tracked using the municipal registry, until one year after ICU admission. Patients were grouped according to age and according to LoS. Note that the LoS groups were not mutually exclusive. The ethics committee of the University Medical Centre Utrecht approved the study and gave a waiver of informed consent (protocol number 10/006). Results Inclusion and overall survival were shown in figure 1. In total, 7165 unique patients were included. Baseline characteristics are shown in table 1. One year survival varied markedly, from 82.6% in patients < 65 years with ICU LoS < 1 week, to 22.2% in patients > 80 years with ICU LoS > 2 weeks (figure 2). In all LoS strata, increasing age was associated with a decreasing one year survival. There was also a distinct drop in one year survival when ICU LoS was more than 1 week, in every age category.