Background: The association between the total bilirubin/albumin (B/A) and the all-cause mortality of critically ill patients with acute kidney injury (AKI) remains unclear. This retrospective study aimed to investigate the relationship between B/A ratio and mortality in patients with AKI.
Methods: The clinical data of AKI patients in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database were retrospectively analyzed. Patients were divided into the low and high B/A groups (B/A ≤ 0.25 and B/A > 0.25, respectively). The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality, and the secondary outcomes were 60-day, 1-year and 4-year all-cause mortality. Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox proportional risk models were constructed to evaluate the effect of B/A on survival outcomes.
Results: The 28-day mortality rates were 18.00% and 25.10% in the low and high B/A groups, respectively (P < 0.001). The Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that patients with higher B/A values had higher all-cause mortality risk (log-rank P < 0.0001). The multivariate Cox proportional risk analysis showed that B/A was an independent risk predictor for death at 28 days, 60 days, 1 year, and 4 years.
Conclusion: B/A is an independent risk factor for increased mortality in patients with AKI and may be used as a predictor of clinical outcomes in AKI.
Copyright: © 2023 Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.