Peripheral venous lactate at admission is associated with in-hospital mortality, a prospective cohort study

Background The prognostic value of blood lactate as a predictor of adverse outcome in the acutely ill patient is unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate if a peripheral venous lactate measurement, taken at admission, is associated with in‐hospital mortality in acutely ill patients with all diagnosis. Furthermore, we wanted to investigate if the test improves a triage model in terms of predicting in‐hospital mortality. Methods We retrieved a cohort of 2272 adult patients from a prospectively gathered acute admission database. We performed regression analysis to evaluate the association between the relevant covariates and the outcome measure: in‐hospital mortality. Results Lactate as a continuous variable was a risk for in‐hospital mortality with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.40 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.25–1.57, P