Study looks into health-related quality of life after intensive care
November 2017: A research team has shown that chronic illness present before arrival into intensive care can have a large impact on quality of life after discharge.
A study led by Dr David Griffith, a Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Anaesthesia and Critical Care and a Principal Investigator at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research, saw 240 patients from two Edinburgh-based Intensive Care Units (ICUs) being monitored for 12 months following discharge.
It revealed that the presence of chronic disease before patients become critically ill has a greater impact on quality of life than the severity of the critical illness itself.
Patients surviving severe illness often experience poor quality of life in the months after hospital discharge. Because it is difficult to measure this in patients before they arrive into an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), experts have assumed that it is their presence in the ICU – with the resulting effects on the muscles and nerves – that causes a negative change.
An Edinburgh-based study of intensive care patients challenges this assumption by showing that regardless of how sick you are whilst you are in intensive care, the presence of multiple chronic illness strongly predicts your quality of life in the year following hospital discharge. This highlights the importance of chronic illness before intensive care in determining post-ICU quality of life.
Links:
Published article in Critical Medicine (Ovid website)
Dr David Griffith – Research Profile