Normalization of mechanical power to anthropometric indices: impact on its association with mortality in critically ill patients

Abstract

Recently, we showed how mechanical power (MP) was associated with patient–centered outcomes in two large prospective cohorts of critically ill patients under invasive ventilation [1]. Normalization of MP, e.g., to the predicted body weight (PBW), has been put forward [2]. One recent paper showed MP normalized to PBW to be a better predictor of mortality than the absolute MP, at least in ARDS patients [3]. We here report the results of a posthoc analysis of the datasets used in our abovementioned publication [1]. We tested the hypothesis that MP normalized to three common anthropometric indexes, i.e., PBW, body mass index (BMI), and body surface area (BSA) are better predictors of in–hospital mortality than absolute MP in critically ill patients under invasive ventilation.