title: The prognosis of medical coma in Ibadan: results of multivariate analysis.
abstract: During a recent prospective investigation of 116 children with medical coma in Ibadan, 52 (45%) survived intact, 23 (20%) developed residual neurological deficits and the remaining 41 (35%) died. This series is concerned with the use of multivariate analysis in predicting outcome of medical coma in an individual patient, based mostly on clinical information (27 variables) obtained within 12 hours of admission. Stepwise logistic regression analysis revealed that only 17 of the 27 variables have independent significance in predicting outcome. When discriminant analysis was performed on these 17 variables so as to obtain a classification function of outcome (survived intact, survived with deficits and dead), 92% of the cases were correctly classified. Eight children were, however, seriously misclassified. These were four intact survivors and four dead cases who were classified as dead and survived without neurological sequelae, respectively. These results suggest that multivariate analysis of clinical and laboratory information obtained in the comatose state can provide predictive information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Paediatrics, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria.
authors.forename: F S
authors.initials: FS
authors.lastname: Bondi
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003128:Coma / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000401:mortality*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009549:Nigeria / Q000453:epidemiology; D011379:Prognosis; D011446:Prospective Studies; D015996:Survival Rate