ArticleCritical care medicine2011
Elevation of blood urea nitrogen is predictive of long-term mortality in critically ill patients independent of "normal" creatinine.
Article in Critical care medicine, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
91 citing papers in PubMed, 174 citations in OpenAlex.
- Metabolomics in pneumonia and sepsis: an analysis of the GenIMS cohort study.Intensive care medicine · 2013Trial
- Predictive value of CD44 in membranous nephropathy with focal segmental glomerular sclerosis lesions treated with calcineurin inhibitors.Renal failure · 2026Article
- A Simple Admission-Based Score for Early Mortality Risk Stratification in Non-Shock Sepsis: A Pilot Study.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Establishing a nomogram of the risk of in-hospital mortality in children with suspected sepsis and validating the applicability of the Phoenix.BMC pediatrics · 2026Article
- Article
- Renal function dynamics in COVID-19: exploring biomarker interactions with D-dimer and C-reactive proteins.Bioscience reports · 2026Article
- Serum antithrombin III level predicts acute kidney injury in patients with traumatic brain injury.Experimental and therapeutic medicine · 2026Article
- Association between admission blood urea nitrogen and clinical outcomes in patients with large ischemic stroke undergoing endovascular treatment.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Article
- Blood urea nitrogen to albumin ratio as a robust predictor of in-hospital mortality in patients with predicted severe acute pancreatitis: a retrospective multicenter observational study.International journal of surgery (London, England) · 2026Observational
- Long-term impact of a quality improvement program on unplanned extubation and clinical outcomes in adult intensive care units: a 24-year single-center observational study.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Association between blood urea nitrogen-to-creatinine ratio and 28-day mortality in acute kidney injury patients undergoing continuous renal replacement therapy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Changes of respiratory microbiota associated with prognosis in pulmonary infection patients with invasive mechanical ventilation-supported respiratory failure.Annals of medicine · 2025Article
- Knockoff-ML: a knockoff machine learning framework for controlled variable selection and risk stratification in electronic health record data.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Association Between the Blood Urea Nitrogen-to-Creatinine Ratio Trajectories and Clinical Outcomes in Critically Ill Hemorrhagic Stroke Patients: Insights from MIMIC-IV Database.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Machine learning prediction of survival in centenarians after age 100: a retrospective, population-based cohort study.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2025Article
- Prognostic Factors for Mortality Following Diaphragmatic Herniorrhaphy in Dogs and Cats: Multivariable Logistic Regression and Machine Learning Approaches.Veterinary sciences · 2025Article
- Association between blood urea nitrogen to albumin ratio and 28-day mortality in ICU patients with acute respiratory failure: a retrospective analysis of MIMIC-IV database.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Evaluation of Blood Biochemical Parameters and Ratios in Piroplasmosis-Infected Horses in an Endemic Region.Veterinary sciences · 2025Article
- Machine learning-based predictive tools and nomogram for in-hospital mortality in critically ill cancer patients: development and external validation using retrospective cohorts.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Association of blood urea nitrogen to glucose ratio with 365-day mortality in critically ill patients with chronic kidney disease: a retrospective study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveWe hypothesized that elevated blood urea nitrogen can be associated with all-cause mortality independent of creatinine in a heterogeneous critically ill population.
designMulticenter observational study of patients treated in medical and surgical intensive care units.
settingTwenty intensive care units in two teaching hospitals in Boston, MA. PATIENTS: A total of 26,288 patients, age ≥ 18 yrs, hospitalized between 1997 and 2007 with creatinine of 0.80-1.30 mg/dL.
interventionsNone. MEASUREMENTS: Blood urea nitrogen at intensive care unit admission was categorized as 10-20, 20-40, and >40 mg/dL. Logistic regression examined death at days 30, 90, and 365 after intensive care unit admission as well as in-hospital mortality. Adjusted odds ratios were estimated by multivariable logistic regression models. MAIN
resultsBlood urea nitrogen at intensive care unit admission was predictive for short- and long-term mortality independent of creatinine. Thirty days following intensive care unit admission, patients with blood urea nitrogen of >40 mg/dL had an odds ratio for mortality of 5.12 (95% confidence interval, 4.30-6.09; p < .0001) relative to patients with blood urea nitrogen of 10-20 mg/dL. Blood urea nitrogen remained a significant predictor of mortality at 30 days after intensive care unit admission following multivariable adjustment for confounders; patients with blood urea nitrogen of >40 mg/dL had an odds ratio for mortality of 2.78 (95% confidence interval, 2.27-3.39; p < .0001) relative to patients with blood urea nitrogen of 10-20 mg/dL. Thirty days following intensive care unit admission, patients with blood urea nitrogen of 20-40 mg/dL had an odds ratio of 2.15 (95% confidence interval, 1.98-2.33; <.0001) and a multivariable odds ratio of 1.53 (95% confidence interval, 1.40-1.68; p < .0001) relative to patients with blood urea nitrogen of 10-20 mg/dL. Results were similar at 90 and 365 days following intensive care unit admission as well as for in-hospital mortality. A subanalysis of patients with blood cultures (n = 7,482) demonstrated that blood urea nitrogen at intensive care unit admission was associated with the risk of blood culture positivity.
conclusionAmong critically ill patients with creatinine of 0.8-1.3 mg/dL, an elevated blood urea nitrogen was associated with increased mortality, independent of serum creatinine.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.