HealthDay News — Frequent prior hospitalization and National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) rating at admission may predict 30-day readmission after ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, according to researchers.
“Understanding the characteristics of patients at high risk of readmission is critical,” wrote the research team led by Roy E. Strowd, MD, from the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and colleagues. Their findings were published in the American Journal of Medical Quality.
To identify factors associated with remission, investigators retrospectively compared 79 cases readmitted to the same hospital within 30 days of acute stroke and 86 frequency-matched controls.
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Readmitted patients were more likely to have more than two hospitalizations in the year prior (21.5% versus 2.3% in controls, P<0.001), congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, cancer, acute renal failure, pneumonia, urinary infection, and absence of hyperlipidemia, researchers found.
Admission NIHSS (odds ratio, 1.072 per 1-point increase; P=0.005), prior hospitalizations (OR, 2.205 per admission; P<0.001), and absence of hyperlipidemia (OR, 0.444; P=0.023) were independently associated with readmission in multivariate modeling.
“If validated, these characteristics identify high-risk patients and focus efforts to reduce readmission,” wrote the investigators.
