Readmission to the hospital after acute GI bleeding in children is most often associated with an initial diagnosis of portal hypertension or esophageal variceal hemorrhage, based on data from a retrospective study of 9,902 patients.
Rebleeding in adults may be predicted by endoscopic characteristics of the bleeding source in some cases, but “there is still a considerable subgroup of children admitted with acute gastrointestinal bleeding and not endoscoped but in whom we do not have any measure to predict rebleeding including after discharge,” Thomas M. Attard, MD, Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, Mo., and his colleagues said.
The study included children aged 1-21 years with upper or indeterminate GI bleeding who were discharged from 49 pediatric hospitals between January 1, 2007 and September 30, 2015. Overall, 1,460 children (16%) were readmitted at least once within 30 days, with 72 readmitted twice and an average of 10 days’ time to readmission.
Readmission for recurrent bleeding was most frequently associated with an initial diagnosis of portal hypertension (20%) or esophageal variceal hemorrhage (20%). Children who had undergone endoscopy (odds ratio, 0.77) or Meckel’s scan (OR, 0.51) on initial admission were least likely to require readmission.
Children with one or two complex chronic conditions were almost twice as likely to be readmitted than were those with no complex chronic conditions, and a longer initial hospital stay and early treatment with proton pump inhibitors were associated with increased likelihood of readmission. “These may be indicative of more medically frail patients and greater severity of initial illness, respectively,” the researchers said. They found no association between increased risk of readmission and demographic factors including age, sex, race, and urban vs. rural residence (J Pediatr. 2017 Feb. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2017.01.044).