Incidence and risk factors of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in pediatric intensive care unit admitted patients

To assess the incidence and risk factors of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in children admitted to pediatric intensive care unit for more than 6 hrs.
We prospectively collected medical records of children between 1 month and 18 years old admit-ted to our 10 bed PICU of a tertiary care university hospital between December 1, 2014 and May 30, 2015. De-mographic data, admission diagnosis and basic laboratory data were recorded. We defined upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGI) as any evidence of blood in nasogastric aspirates, hematemesis and melena witnessed between minimum 6 hours to maximum 5 days after admission. We documented it and detected previously described factors for UGI bleeding such as mechanical ventilation, coagulopathy, organ failure, feeding, and drug prophy-laxis. Finally data were used in a multivariate analysis.
Of 157 medical records, 148 patients were eligible. The incidence of UGI bleeding was 34.45%. The most common indication for PICU admission was respiratory system dysfunction (32.2%). Mechanical ven-tilation, thrombocytopenia and prolonged PT and PTT were the significant factors in our study using univariate analysis and mechanical ventilation was the only significant risk factor using multivariate analysis
The incidence of UGI bleeding in PICU admitted patients is significant and mechanical ventila-tion is the most important risk factor for GI bleeding.