Introduction: Patients in an emergency department are diverse. Some are more seriously ill than others and some even arrive in multi-organ failure. Knowledge of the prevalence of organ failure and its prognosis in unselected patients is important from a diagnostic, hospital planning, and from a quality evaluation point of view, but is not reported systematically.
Objectives: To analyse the prevalence and prognosis of new onset organ failure in unselected acute patients at arrival to hospital.
Methods: A systematic review of studies of prevalence and prognosis of acutely ill patients with organ failure at arrival to hospital. We searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase and Cinahl, and read references in included studies. Two authors decided independently on study eligibility and extracted data. Results were summarised qualitatively.
Results: Four studies were included with a total of 678,960 patients. The number of different organ failures reported in the studies ranged from one to six, and the settings were emergency departments and wards. The definitions of organ failure varied between studies. The prevalence of organ failure was 7%, 14%, 14%, and 23%, and in-hospital mortality was 5%, 11% and 15% respectively. The relative risk of in-hospital mortality for patients with organ failure compared to patients without organ failure varied from 2.58 to 8.65. Numbers of organ failures per 1,000 visits varied from 71 to 256.
Conclusion: The results of this review indicate that clinicians have good reasons to be alert when a patient arrives to the emergency department; as a state of organ failure seems both frequent and highly severe. However, most studies identified were performed in patients after a diagnosis was established, and only very few studies were performed in unselected patients.
Systematic review registration number: PROSPERO: CRD42017060871.