Identifying critically ill patients at high risk for developing acute renal failure: a pilot study.

Background: Acute renal failure (ARF) occurs commonly in the intensive care unit (ICU), but predicting which patients will develop ARF is difficult. We set out to determine which risk factors would predict the development of ARF in critically ill patients who are admitted to the ICU without ARF.

Methods: From August 2002 to April 2003, we enrolled medical-surgical ICU admissions into a cohort using a sampling tool based on their risk factor (RF) profile.