3.1 Description of study population
Of the 1000 consecutive patients who underwent elective abdominal surgery that were initially observed for the study, a final total of 838 patients were included in the study as training cohort. 162 patients were excluded due to reasons such as post-op complications leading to second surgery (n=18), severe liver or kidney failure (n=22), ASA Grade V (n=4), history of previous multiple surgeries (n=44), Other complications such as atrial flutter, lung infection and so on (n=36) and incomplete patient history (n=38).
In terms of patient demographics, 364 patients were males (43.4%) while 474 were females (56.6%). The mean age was 65 years (range, 18–86 years).
As external validation set (346 patients), 194 patients were males (56.1%) and 152 were females (43.9%). The mean age was 64 years (range, 19–87 years).
3.2. Incidence of POD
Of the 838 participants, 10.9% (91/838) were diagnosed with POD. The incidence of POD was typically observed 2 days after surgery (range, 1–3 days) and more than 95% of the patients were diagnosed within 3 days. All 91 patients were relieved of POD, with the mean duration of the POD of 3 days. Of the 346 participants as external validation set, 6.65% (23/346) were diagnosed with POD.
3.3. Factors associated with development of POD
3.3.1. Univariate analysis for patients undergoing abdominal surgery with POD
The patients’ demographic characteristics, pre-operative and intraoperative factors between two groups were compared, and the results are shown in Table 1.
The univariate analysis showed that 11 factors: age, history of diazepam usage, history of cerebrovascular disease, history of psychiatric disease, preoperative blood glucose, location of surgery, duration of surgery, intra-operative sufentanyl, total intraoperative fluid intake, intra-operative blood transfusion and intraoperative positive fluid balance had significantly statistical difference (P<0.05).
3.3.2. Multivariate analysis for patients undergoing abdominal surgery with POD
The statistically significant factors in univariate analysis were included as independent variables, and POD was included as the dependent variable in the binary logistic regression analysis. Since the intraoperative positive fluid balance and total intraoperative fluid infusion are strongly correlated with a correlation of 0.883 (P value <10-12), with reference to previous literature, only positive fluid balance was included in the model [23-25]. By factorizing the significance level into 2 subsets, one P<0.05 and the other P<0.001, we obtained two models. The model with P<0.05 comprised of 10 factors: age, history of diazepam usage, history of cerebrovascular illness, history of psychiatric disease, preoperative blood glucose, location of surgery, duration of surgery, use of sufentanil, intraoperative blood transfusion and intraoperative positive fluid balance. On the other hand, the model with P<0.001 demonstrated that 4 factors including the advanced age (OR = 1.345, P =0.005), history of diazepam usage (OR=3.622, P =0.003), history of cerebrovascular disease (OR=2.150, P=0.012) and the intraoperative positive fluid balance (OR = 1.41, P <0 .001) were independent risk factors for POD development (Table 2).
3.4 Development and validation of the POD Prediction Model
To avoid overfitting, and depending on the result of external validation AUC, the 4-factor model had distinct advantages over the 10-factor model, we chose the selected 4-factor model as our final POD prediction model. The point estimates and 95% CIs for the adjusted odds ratios of covariates, as well as the adjusted P-values of covariate coefficients of the selected model, were reported in Table 2-3.
The AUC based on the prediction of the fitting set was 0.703 (95%CI: 0.637-0.753), indicating a good prediction effect. The optimum cut-off point of the predicted probability that maximized the sum of sensitivity and specificity was 0.12. The mean cross-validation AUC of the selected model was 0.684 (SD=0.068), and the external validation AUC of the selected model was 0.634 (95%CI: 0.511- 0.758) and quite closed to the AUC based on the fitting set (0.703). Moreover, the model’s callibration evaluated by the fitting set calibration curve also indicated that the selected model was robust and performed well in prediction. (Figure 1)
By the constructed prediction model, the predicted probability of a patients experiencing POD is exp(h)/(1+exp(h)), where h = -5.052 + 0.296 age/10 + 1.287 I(history of diazepam usage) + 0.765 I(history of cerebrovascular illness) + 0.349 total intraoperative fluid difference/1000. Here I(·) was the indicator function that took 1 if the condition in the brackets was true and 0 otherwise. The nomogram of the prediction model was given in Figure 2.