Admission serum lactate is associated with all-cause mortality in the pediatric intensive care unit.

OBJECTIVE

Our aim was to assess the relationship between serum lactate levels at intensive care unit (ICU) admission and all-cause mortality in the pediatric ICU.

METHODS

We used the pediatric intensive care (PIC) database (a large pediatric intensive care database in China from 2010 to 2018) to conduct a retrospective analysis to evaluate the serum lactate levels at ICU admission of 12,213 critically ill children admitted to the ICU. We analyzed the association between serum lactate and all-cause mortality. Adjusted smoothing spline plots, subgroup analysis, and segmented multivariate logistic regression analysis were conducted to estimate the relative risk between proportional risk between serum lactate and all-cause mortality.

RESULTS

Of the 12,213 children, 755 (6.18%) died. After fully adjusting for confounding factors, serum lactate was an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality in pediatric ICU (adjusted OR=1.14, 95% CI: 1.12, 1.17). The results of sensitivity analysis showed that in different stratified analyses, the effect of serum lactate on all-cause mortality remained stable.

CONCLUSIONS

Admission serum lactate is a risk factor, which is independent of the presence of acid-base disorders, inflammation, malnutrition, and renal or hepatic dysfunction, for all-cause mortality in the pediatric intensive care unit.