Oh, those weekends, don’t you just love them? They provide us with an opportunity to spend time with our families, drive to the country house or go to the theater. Now, we know they also provide us with an increased opportunity to die in a hospital. Research shows that men with metastatic prostate cancer who are admitted to a hospital on a weekend are more likely to die and suffer complications compared with those admitted on weekdays!
The research, which was led by Marianne Schmid, MD, of Harvard Medical School, used the National Inpatient Sample to identify 534,011 hospitalized men with metastatic prostate cancer. Of these, 81.7% were admitted on a weekday and 18.3% on a weekend. The in-hospital mortality rate was 8.6% for those men admitted on a weekend and 10.9% for those admitted on a weekend.
This means that in a multivariate analysis, a weekend admission was associated with a significant 20% increased odds of death and 15% increased odds of complications compared with a weekday admission.
Dr. Schmid’s team online and ahead of print in BJU International reported these results.
They also found that patients admitted over the weekend were significantly more likely than those admitted on weekdays to be treated at rural hospitals (17.8% vs. 15.7%), non-teaching hospitals (57.6% vs. 53.7%), and low-volume hospitals (53.4% vs. 49.4%). Weekend patients also were significantly less likely than weekday patients to undergo