Measuring the Impact of Comorbidities on 30-day Mortality in Older Adults with Pneumonia

Jacob Morton, PharmD, MBA, BCPS, Antibiotic Stewardship Outcomes Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center, clinical pharmacy research specialist, Wesley Healthcare, discusses his research on 30-day mortality in adults with pneumococcal disease.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“The body of literature that is available to us today really focuses on [the] risk of developing pneumococcal disease in older adults, but there’s really not much data on the impact of comorbidities on 30-day mortality, and there’s even less data on the impact of having multiple of those comorbidities on 30-day mortality. That’s really the basis of our study.

There was a study that came out a few years ago that was really one of the first studies that looked at the concept of risk stacking, or having multiple comorbidities at the same time and trying to quantify the impact of multiple risk factors. That study looked at the development or [the] risk of developing pneumococcal disease when [a] patient had multiple risk factors, so we set out to look at the impact of those risk factors on 30-day mortality.

Basically we found that, starting with two risk factors, the risk of mortality compared to adults that did not have any of those risk factors was double. But once you started adding more and more risk factors the increase in mortality was significant, and so there was a significant increase in 30-day mortality for each additional risk factor all the way up to six risk factors. The risk of 30-day mortality in patients with six risk factors was more than double the risk of mortality in patients with just two risk factors.”