Clinical outcomes and healthcare utilization of acute hepatitis A virus infection with acute kidney injury in hospitalized patients.

BACKGROUND

Patients with acute hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection are at risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI) which may result in increased healthcare resource utilization and worse clinical outcomes. We investigated the impact of AKI on healthcare utilization and clinical outcomes in patients hospitalized with acute HAV infection utilizing a large database.

METHODS

We queried the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) 2007-2014 to identify acute HAV infection-related hospitalizations with and without AKI. Primary outcomes were prevalence of AKI and its predictors with secondary outcomes included the mean length of stay (LOS), hospitalization cost and mortality in both groups.

RESULTS

Out of 68 364 acute HAV infection-related hospitalizations, 47 620 met our study criteria and 7458 (15.7%) had concurrent AKI. HAV patients with AKI were older (62.5 vs. 53.7 years; P value <0.001). A higher mean LOS (10.03 vs. 5.6 days; P value <0.001) and mean total hospitalization cost ($27 171.35 vs. $12 790.26; P value <0.001) were observed in HAV patients with the AKI group. A total of 1032 patients (13.8%) in the AKI group died during the same hospitalization as compared to 681 patients (1.5%) in the non-AKI group, P value <0.001. AKI in HAV was also found to be an independent predictor of mortality [adjusted odds ratio (aOR), 3.28; 95% confidence interval, 2.23-4.84; P value <0.001) after adjusting for the confounding factors.

CONCLUSION

We found that 15.67% of patients hospitalized with acute HAV had AKI which contributed to increased healthcare utilization and higher mortality which is preventable.