Dehydration as referral diagnosis to a medical admittance department
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Documents
- a02190091_web
Final published version, 345 KB, PDF document
INTRODUCTION: Patients are frequently admitted to hospital on suspicion of dehydration. The diagnosis is widely used for referral to admittance departments. We aimed to prospectively evaluate patients admitted with a diagnosis of dehydration in terms of the accuracy of this diagnosis, to evaluate clinical and biochemical data and to evaluate the outcome and provide a review of the concept of dehydration.
METHODS: Patients who had dehydration as their primary referral diagnosis were prospectively included over a 70-day period. We defined dehydration based on osmolality > 295 mmol/kg. Biochemistry, imaging and outcome were examined.
RESULTS: A total of 128 patients were admitted on suspicion of dehydration, accounting for 7.5% of all patients admitted. In all, 82 of the 128 (64%) were dehydrated. The diagnoses at discharge included infections mainly, but also diagnoses such as cancers and stroke were registered. Mortality during hospitalisation was 9%. Mortality at six months was 27% for the entire group; 37% in the dehydration group versus 11% in the non-dehydration group (p = 0.002). Older age was the strongest predictor of death.
CONCLUSIONS: Suspicion of dehydration is a frequent admittance diagnosis. We suspect that a referral diagnosis of dehydration often reflects an unspecified concern rather than a real suspicion of dehydration. Patients with dehydration had a high in-hospital and six-month mortality, reflecting the severity of this diagnosis.
FUNDING: not relevant.
TRIAL REGISTRATION: The Danish Data Protection Agency, R. no. 05380, BFH-2017-029.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | A02190091 |
Journal | Danish Medical Journal |
Volume | 67 |
Issue number | 12 |
Number of pages | 7 |
ISSN | 1603-9629 |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Articles published in the DMJ are “open access”. This means that the articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Links
- https://ugeskriftet.dk/dmj/dehydration-referral-diagnosis-medical-admittance-department
Final published version
Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk
ID: 269794762