Association between lactate/albumin ratio and all-cause mortality in patients with acute respiratory failure: A retrospective analysis

Previous studies have shown that lactate/albumin ratio (LAR) can be used as a prognostic biomarker to independently predict the mortality of sepsis and severe heart failure. However, the role of LAR as an independent prognostic factor in all-cause mortality in patients with acute respiratory failure (ARF) remains to be clarified. Therefore, we retrospectively analyzed 2170 patients with ARF in Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care Database III from 2001 to 2012. By drawing the receiver operating characteristic curve, LAR shows a better predictive value in predicting the 30-day mortality of ARF patients (AUC: 0.646), which is higher than that of albumin (AUC: 0.631) or lactate (AUC: 0.616) alone, and even higher than SOFA score(AUC: 0.642). COX regression analysis and Kaplan-Meier curve objectively and intuitively show that high LAR is a risk factor for patients with ARF, which is positively correlated with all-cause mortality. As an easy-to-obtain and objective biomarker, LAR deserves further verification by multi-center prospective studies.