[Aim] The present study was carried out to clarify factors that could predict early death within 30 days following percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) procedure.
[Patients and Methods] The subjects consisted of 170 patients who underwent a PEG procedure from May 2003 to December 2005. We analyzed several factors, age, preoperative serum albumin value, transthyretin value and a total lymphocyte count. We tried to determine early prognostic factors using chi-square test and multivariate analysis by a Cox proportion hazard model.
[Results] The 30-day mortality rate in our subjects was 10.6% (18 of 170). The 30-day mortality rate of the patients with serum albumin value less than 2.5g/dl was significantly higher than that of other patients. Especially, in patients over 90 years old, this rate was very high with 50%. Multivariate analysis revealed that serum albumin value was a most reliable predictive factor for early mortality.
[Conclusion] The serum albumin value may be useful for predicting factor of early death following PEG. It seemed that PEG should be performed carefully to the patients whose serum albumin value was less than 2.5g/dl.
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