Short- and long-term outcomes of patients with solid tumours following non-surgical intensive care admission.

Background: There has been a significant increase in the number of patients presenting with cancer related emergencies and potentially requiring critical care admission.

Aim: To analyse the short and long-term outcomes of patients with solid tumours requiring unplanned medical admission to a specialist cancer intensive care unit (ICU).

Design: An unplanned cohort study.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of patients admitted to a UK specialist tertiary oncology CCU between September 2009 and September 2015. The primary outcome measures were survival to CCU discharge and 1-year survival.

Results: 687 patients had an unplanned medical admission. The most frequent primary tumours were lymphoma (22.1%), lung (15.2%) and colorectal (13.0%), and 181 (44.4%) were known to have metastases. The median Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II and Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) scores were 21 and 17, respectively. ICU mortality was 26.7%, with total hospital mortality of 41.9%. The median survival of the total cohort was 56 days after ICU admission, with 107 patients surviving 365 days. Patients with metastatic disease were almost twice as likely to die within the year following ICU admission compared with their counterparts without metastases. Only pancreatic and lung primaries were shown to have a statistically significant impact on survival at 1 year. Pneumonia carried with it the worst prognosis (cumulative survival 0.11), followed by sepsis (0.25) and non-infective respiratory disease (0.26).

Conclusions: The stage and type of cancer appear to have minimal impact on short-term ICU outcomes and only confer poorer long-term prognosis related to the disease.