Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index Plays Important Role in Predicting In-Hospital Mortality in Patients With Severe Fever With Thrombocytopenia Syndrome: A Multi-Center Observational Study

Abstract

Geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI) has been proposed as a reliable indicator of nutritional state and, when decreased, is closely associated with the severity and mortality risk of infectious disease. The current study retrospectively recruited patients who were admitted for SFTS from January 1, 2011 to January 1, 2024 at six medical centers. Two hundred and eighty-two patients with SFTS who met the study protocol were finally enrolled in this study. Sixty patients suffered in-hospital death during hospitalization, with a mortality rate of 21.3%. After adjustment of multiple models, GNRI remained a significant predictor of in-hospital death, either examining HR by evaluating 1-unit decrease of GNRI or by taking the higher median of GNRI as reference (all p < 0.05). GNRI displayed a moderate-to-high strength in predicting in-hospital death, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.791 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.725–0.857, p < 0.001]. The addition of GNRI to a former established model exhibited significant improvement in the predictive value for in-hospital death. GNRI, an important indicator simply calculated from ALB and BMI, is significantly and independently related to the risk of in-hospital death in patients with SFTS.