Friday March 17, 2006
ICU anemia score
A group of physicians from The CRISMA Laboratory (Clinical Research, Investigation, and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness), Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, USA have developed this ICU anemia score, which can be calculated at 6 hours after admission to intensive care unit.
6 points if......Lactate more than 1.5 mg/dl
5 points if......Inotropic support
11 points if....Surgical patient
5 points if......Non-emergent surgery
3 points to.....Each g/dl of hemoglobin less than 14 g/dl
Risk of anemia starts rising beyond 12 points and goes up. Also, points can be plotted on the probability of anemia graph (figure 3 in reference).
Clinical Significance: Once risk of anemia is determined, earlier and more appropriate use of blood transfusion-sparing strategies can be applied such as erythropoietin.
Note: Its hard to fully grasp the idea in nut-shell and icuroom.net editors strongly recommend to read article fully as available free by clicking on reference.
Reference:
Predicting late anemia in critical illness - Eric B Milbrandt,Gilles Clermont, Javier Martinez, Alex Kersten, Malik T Rahim and Derek C Angus - The CRISMA Laboratory (Clinical Research, Investigation, and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness), Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, 3550 Terrace Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA -Critical Care 2006, 10:R39
