A Frailty Assessment Tool to Predict In-Hospital Mortality in Patients with Acute Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Background The exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) is a chronic, frequent, and life-threatening lung disease. In 2014, a frailty index (FI) based on deficits in commonly used laboratory tests (FI-Lab) was suggested to identify older adults at increased risk of death. Objective We aim to study the prognostic value of the FI-Lab in older Chinese patients who were admitted because of AECOPD. Methods We screened 1932 older patients hospitalized with AECOPD from September 2016 to June 2019 at Zhenjiang First People's Hospital, China. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to identify prognostic factors for in-hospital mortality. Results A total of 77 survivors and 77 non-survivors were finally included in the study. Both the mean DECAF (including dyspnea, eosinopenia, consolidation, acidemia, and atrial fibrillation) score and the mean FI-Lab value of non-survivors were statistically higher than those of survivors (4.45 ± 0.80 versus 3.03 ± 0.90, P=0.000; 0.51 ± 0.13 versus 0.29 ± 0.10, P=0.000, respectively). Logistic regression analysis suggested that DECAF Rank and FI-Lab Rank were strongly related factors of death in AECOPD patients. The areas under the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves were 0.906 for FI-Lab and 0.870 for DECAF (P=0.2991). Conclusion FI-Lab is a simple, efficient, and objective tool to stratify the risk of in-hospital mortality of AECOPD.