SAN DIEGO – Among patients with pulmonary hypertension presenting for elective surgery, self-reported poor functional status is associated with multiple comorbidities and is independently predictive of longer hospital length of stay, results from an ongoing single-center study suggest.
“Patients with pulmonary hypertension (PHTN) presenting for elective surgery are at significantly higher risk for adverse perioperative outcomes, including increased hospital length of stay, right ventricular failure, cardiac arrhythmia, persistent postoperative hypoxemia, coronary ischemia and death,” researchers led by Dr. Aalap C. Shah wrote in an abstract presented at the at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. “The diagnosis of PHTN is based on costly echocardiographic examination and right heart catheterization and should be reserved for high-risk patients. No studies have assessed the role of self-reported functional classification on PHTN severity stratification, and few studies have achieved a sufficiently large patient sample size.”
Dr. Aalap C. Shah
In an effort to evaluate the predictive value of self-reported exercise tolerance on echocardiogram findings, outcomes, and length of stay (LOS) after noncardiac, nonobstetric surgery, the researchers queried the University of Washington database for all PHTN seen in preoperative anesthesia clinic for noncardiac, nonobstetric procedures from April 2007 through September 2013. Inclusion criteria required an echocardiogram less than 1 year prior to the procedure and available patient-reported functional status, which was defined as less than four metabolic equivalents (METS) in exercise testing or four METS or greater. Dr. Shah, formerly a resident in the University of Washington’s department of anesthesiology and pain medicine, and his associates used univariate analyses to compare functional status with echocardiographic findings, complication rates, and length of stay (LOS). At the meeting he presented results from 294 patients evaluated to date: 143 with normal functional status and 151 with poor functional status. Their mean age was 62 years, and 51% of patients were female.
Compared with their counterparts with normal functional status, patients with poor functional status trended toward a higher complication rate at hospital discharge (14.6% vs. 7%, respectively; P = .041) and had a higher cumulative rate of complications (33 vs. 15; P = .035). However, no association between functional status and complications was observed 30 days postoperatively.
Patients with poor functional status had a significantly longer average LOS, compared with patients with normal functional status (7.21 vs. 4.73 days; P = .047). Open surgical approach was also an independent predictor of increased LOS (odds ratio 2.39; P = .005). No significant independent predictors of complications were observed at discharge or 30 days postoperatively.
“Going forward, the goal is to use these data to create a risk stratification algorithm to figure out: Does a patient with good functional status and pulmonary hypertension undergoing toe surgery, for example, really need an echocardiogram before getting surgery?” said Dr. Shah said, who is now an anesthesiology fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Hopefully we can show that using these risk stratification algorithms can decrease the costs and decrease the time to actually getting surgery.”
The researchers reported having no financial disclosures.