CV event risk could increase shortly after spouse’s ICU admission
Patients with a spouse who was admitted to the ICU may have increased risk for CV events in the few weeks after ICU admission, researchers found.
“Spouses of ICU patients should pay attention to their own physical health, especially in terms of cardiovascular disease,” Hiroyuki Ohbe, MD, MPH, PhD student in the department of clinical epidemiology and health economics at the University of Tokyo School of Public Health, said in a press release. “The ICU can be a stressful environment with significant caregiving burdens, and spouses may face tough decisions about continuing or ending life-sustaining treatment.”
In this matched-pair cohort study published in Circulation, researchers analyzed data from married couples from the Japanese Medical Data Center database. The exposure group (n = 7,815) comprised patients with spouses admitted to the ICU for more than 2 days, whereas the nonexposure group (n = 31,250) consisted of patients matched by sex, age and medical insurance status. The mean age of the matched study cohort was 54 years (35% men).
The primary outcome for this study was any visit for CVD, and secondary outcomes included hospitalization for CVDs and hospitalization for severe CV events, defined as ACS, stroke, congestive HF, arrhythmia and pulmonary embolism. Each outcome was assessed in several periods after the spouse’s ICU admission: 1 to 4 weeks, 5 to 8 weeks, 9 to 12 weeks and 13 to 16 weeks. Outcomes were also assessed 21 to 24 weeks before the spouse’s ICU admission to observe whether CV events were unrelated to the ICU admission.
Compared with spouses in the nonexposure group, those in the exposure group were more likely to be diagnosed with hyperlipidemia (22% vs. 23%), diabetes (17% vs. 18%) and hypertension (20% vs. 22%).
After ICU admission, visits for CVD occurred in 2.7% of patients in the exposure group compared with 2.1% of those in the nonexposure group (OR = 1.27; 95% CI, 1.08-1.5). Results for CVD hospitalization and severe CV events were similar to those in the main analysis.
“Although the use of data on employed and insured individuals may limit generalizability to other populations, our findings indicate that the ICU admission of a spouse may contribute to the onset of cardiovascular diseases, highlighting a potential target for improving outcomes for the family members of ICU patients,” Ohbe and colleagues wrote.
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