Patients admitted to an intensive care unit who do not adopt an antigravity posture have a higher odds of death

ABSTRACT Until now, few functional performance markers are able to predict death in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). This study aimed to identify the association between non-adoption of antigravity posture and death in patients admitted to an adult ICU. It is a retrospective and analytical study, performed through the analysis of medical records. Association between non-adoption of antigravity posture and death was tested by multiple logistic regression adjusted for gender, age, disease severity (measured by Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Classification System II [Apache II]), time of invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV), and period of sedation. The odds ratio (OR) with confidence interval (CI=95%) was estimated. A total of 92 sequential patients were included in the study. A strong association between the non-adoption of antigravity posture in the ICU and death (ORadjusted=37.7, CI=4.76-293, p=0.001) was observed. Thus, one can conclude that patients who did not adopt an antigravity posture during ICU admission had a much higher odds of mortality. This simple strategy to classify functional capacity of critical patients can be routinely used by the team as a simple and dichotomous variable for ICU mortality prognosis.