Risk Factors of Central Venous Catheter Related Infections in Intensive Care Patients

2002 Mathematics Subject Classification: 62P10.

This study investigates the incidence of and risk factors for Central Venous Catheter (CVC) infection in intensive care patients of Military Medical Academy in Sofia. CVCs were prospectively studied in patients who had lines inserted in general or neurosurgical intensive care and were expected to have the line in situ for at least 7 days. Catheters were cultured for CVC related infections and blood culture done when indicated. In 29% there is a CVC related infection and in 24.26% - a CVC related sepsis. After adjustment of duration of catheterization, independent predictors of CVC related infections were type of catheter, insertion site, sex, and Acute Physiology Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE). Multivariate discriminant analysis was used in order to find out significantly important factors for CVC infection an sepsis. The variables entered into the model were those found to be statistically significant (p ¡ 0.005) on multivariate analysis. The criterion for entering a variable into the model was the values of Mahalanobis statistics and the corresponding values of F-statistics [11]. The software package use for statistical analysis was STATISTIKA 5.0.

Partially supported by Mathind IST-2000-26015 and by Pro-enbis GTC1-2001-43031.