Do critically ill patients with AKI benefit from furosemide? Further real-word evidence from a large multi-center database

Abstract

We are interested in the recently published article about the effect of furosemide on the outcomes of patients with acute renal injury (AKI) [1], because the result seems against to the current guidelines [2]. AKI is commonly faced by the intensivists and its effects on mortality have drawn great attention recently. Zhao and his colleagues explored the effect of furosemide on the outcomes of critically ill patients with AKI in a real-word dataset, the MIMIC III database. They found the furosemide administration was associated with better short-term survival, especially in the AKI UO stages 2-3. However, the dataset they used in the analysis is single-center. We notice that another real-world database, the eICU database, which has larger size of data (200,859 patients) and more contributing centers (335 units at 208 hospitals), has been available to the world [3]. We reproduced the main analysis of Zhao's study in the eICU database to give more evidence for the real-world research. The main results for outcomes are presented in Table 1. Some results are similar with Zhao's study [1]: the furosemide group has a higher recovery rate and longer hospital and ICU stay. However, a reduction in in