[Incidence of acquired morbidity and its impact on patients in a pediatric intensive care unit based on the functional status scale]

Introduction: a significant number of children suffer cognitive, physical, mental and social limitations as a result of critical illnesses and their subsequent treatment. Pollack et al. developed the functional status scale with the purpose of measuring the change in functional status during hospitalization.

Objectives: evaluate the acquired morbidity upon discharge from the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Specific objectives: compare mortality and acquired morbidity rates, analyze changes in functional status categories, identify the most affected domains, describe relationships between domain affection and admission diagnosis, between domain affection and age group, between morbidity and days in invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV), non-invasive ventilation and high-flow oxygen therapy.

Methodology: observational, descriptive, prospective and longitudinal study. Patients between 1 and 180 months of age requiring ventilatory support for at least 48 hours, between February 2021 and February 2024, were included.

Results: 90.9% survived, and of these, 26.9% developed acquired morbidity. The 42% of patients changed their functional status at least one point. The most affected domains were motor and feeding. Those who died had fewer days of IMV and hospitalization.

Conclusion: The incidence of acquired morbidity was higher than mortality in the analyzed period. Children who developed morbidity remained hospitalized for a longer period of time and had greater requirements and days of IMV. Increased survival makes mortality an insufficient outcome metric. More studies with longer follow-up are needed.