What is it about?
Blood glucose levels are associated with the disease severity of community-acquired pneumonia. Physicians sometimes use scoring systems to predict the severity of disease to inform the patient or change treatment decisions. Certain scoring systems already use glucose levels as part of their algorithm to predict mortality in patients, but they only use an abnormally high glucose level as a factor. We have modelled both high and low glucose levels, although both did predict mortality in pneumonia patients; there was no additional value to just using high glucose levels.
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Why is it important?
The prediction of disease severity or risk of mortality can be directly used to inform the patient, family, and could help the physician with treatment decisions. Unfortunately, modelling high and low glucose levels did not optimize current prediction tools.
Perspectives
Although prediction systems were not improved using the whole spectrum of glucose levels, ideally this methodology should be used for all variables associated with disease severity/ mortality. This paper could help with the development of future prediction systems.
Douwe Postma
Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Do admission glucose levels aid in predicting mortality associated with community-acquired pneumonia?, European Respiratory Journal, October 2017, European Respiratory Society (ERS),
DOI: 10.1183/13993003.00307-2017.
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