Resident Physician Allegheny Health Network Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Introduction: Frailty indices have become important tools in the assessment of neurosurgical patients in evaluating preoperative success, morbidity risk, and prognosis. No evaluation of the relationship between cerebral abscesses and frailty indices has been performed at this point.
Methods: A retrospective review was performed of all cerebral abscesses at our institution from 2016-2021. Post surgical abscesses and patient's with concurrent cerebral malignancy were excluded. Modified Frailty Index 5 Factors scores (mFI-5) were calculated retrospectively for all the patients. Detailed clinical and radiographic information was recorded for each patient, and a quantile multilinear regression analysis was used for data analysis.
Results: A total of 35 patients met our inclusion criteria. mFI-5 scores were found to be statistically significant on multivariate analysis in predicting modified Rankin Scores (mRS) on presentation (OR 1.333, p = 0.0018). It was not significant in predicting length of stay, mRS on discharge, mRS on 1 month follow up, mRS at 3 month follow up, and recovery of presenting neurologic deficit.
Conclusion : Higher mFI-5 scores correlated with higher mRS scores on admission, but they did not correlate with chances for neurologic recovery, mRS on discharge, mRS on follow up, or LOS. This study indicates that patients with higher mFI-5 scores should still be treated aggressively. A larger sample size is still necessary to further delineate the relationship.
