Introduction:
The American Heart Association’s updated guidelines for management of patients with primary intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) recommend monitoring and early care at centers with advanced nursing and neuro-critical care expertise. This entails frequent transfer of ICH patients to certified Comprehensive Stroke Centers (CSC) for higher level of care. We hypothesized that transferred patients (TP) to a CSC will differ from directly admitted patients (DAP) in terms of patient characteristics, treatment factors, and functional and quality of life (QOL) outcomes.
Methods:
We analyzed data from a prospectively collected ICH registry at our CSC. Patients with traumatic or secondary causes of ICH were excluded. We collected data on demographics, comorbidities, presentation lab values, clinical characteristics, radiological parameters, in-hospital treatment variables, and discharge and long term outcomes. Functional outcomes were captured as modified Rankin Scale (mRS) and EuroQol 5D (EQ-5D) was used to assess QOL indices.
Results:
Out of a total 192 primary ICH patients, 114 (59.4%) were transferred-in. TP were significantly older, had lower diastolic blood pressure, lower arrival National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score, and smaller hematoma volumes as compared to DAP. A higher proportion of TP had a good discharge functional outcome (mRS score 0 - 3) as compared to DAP (29.8% vs. 15.4%, p = 0.02), this trend was also observed for Day-90 mRS (34.2% vs. 24.4%, p = 0.09). TP also reported significantly better QOL indices at Day-90; EQ-5D total median (Q1, Q3) score [10 (6,16) vs. 15 (9.5,18), p = 0.02] and self-reported median (Q1,Q3) score [75 (50,88) vs. 62.5(40,70)], p < 0.01]. Day-90 data are complete for approximately 50% patients. After adjusting for initial stroke severity, the discharge mRS was however not significantly different between TP and DAP.
Conclusions:
A larger proportion of ICH patients were transferred-in. Our data suggest that TP have lower disease severity, and better discharge and long term outcomes. However, they had similar treatment intensity as DAP at the CSC. We continue to capture day-90, 6 and 12-month functional and QOL data, which will be presented.
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