External validation of the PALIAR index for patients with advanced, nononcologic chronic diseases.

OBJECTIVE: To externally validate the PALIAR index for patients with advanced, nononcologic chronic diseases.

METHODS: We performed a prospective, multicenter cohort study that included patients with advanced, nononcologic chronic diseases hospitalized in internal medicine departments and treated consecutively by the researchers between July 1st and December 31st, 2014. Data were collected from each patient on age, sex, advanced disease, Charlson index, comorbidities, Barthel index, terminal illness symptoms, need for caregiver, hospitalization in the past 3 and 12 months and number of drugs. We calculated the PALIAR index and conducted a 6-month follow-up. To analyze the association between the variables and mortality, we constructed several multivariate logistic regression models.

RESULTS: The study included 295 patients with a mean age of 82.7 (8.6) years, 148 (50.2%) of whom were women. Mortality at 6 months was associated with the albumin level (OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.30-0.85, p = 0.011), and the terminal illness (OR 2.75, 95% CI 1.55-4.89, p = 0.001). The PALIAR index showed good discrimination for predicting mortality (statistical C, 0.728, 95% CI 0.670-0.787). A reduced version of the PALIAR index showed similar mortality discriminatory power.

CONCLUSIONS: The PALIAR index is a reliable tool for predicting mortality in patients with advanced, nononcologic chronic diseases.