Background: With increasing life expectancy and ICU admission of elderly patients, mechanical ventilation, and weaning trials have increased worldwide.
Methods: We evaluated a cohort with 479 subjects in the ICU. Patients younger than 18 y, tracheostomized, or with neurologic diseases were excluded, resulting in 331 subjects. Subjects ≥70 y old were considered elderly, whereas those <70 y old were considered non-elderly. Besides the conventional weaning indexes, we evaluated the performance of the integrative weaning index (IWI). The probability of successful weaning was investigated using relative risk and logistic regression. The Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test was used to calibrate and the C statistic was calculated to evaluate the association between predicted probabilities and observed proportions in the logistic regression model.
Results: Prevalence of successful weaning in the sample was 83.7%. There was no difference in mortality between elderly and non-elderly subjects (P = .16), in days of mechanical ventilation (P = .22) and days of weaning (P = .55). In elderly subjects, the IWI was the only respiratory variable associated with mechanical ventilation weaning in this population (P < .001).
Conclusions: The IWI was the independent variable found in weaning of elderly subjects that may contribute to the critical moment of this population in intensive care.
Keywords: elderly; mechanical ventilation; weaning.
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