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Abstract
Predicting patient outcome is an important component of patient care in critical care units. Physicians are frequently faced with a number of challenging questions posed by patients, relatives, referring physicians, and other health-care providers.
Will the patient make a full recovery?
What functional status will the patient have following recovery?
How soon will the patient be discharged?
How aggressively should this patient be resuscitated in the case of cardiopulmonary arrest?
Hospital administrators pose a different set of challenging questions. Are our limited resources properly allocated?
Can we justify the cost?
Mortality in ICU is approximately 30 %, half of them die of sepsis and Multiple System Organ Failure (Chang , 1988)
Early identification of patients most at risk of sepsis and adverse outcomes mean that they can be targeted more accurately with highly potential clinical interventions.
Many data suggest that microalbuminuria is of value as an index of vascular damage, especially in hypertension and diabetes, and there is increasing information on its association with traditional cardiovascular risk factors and its prognostic value. The association between microalbuminuria and peripheral markers of endothelial damage or dysfunction such as Von Willebrand factor, suggests the possibility that microalbuminuria may be a simple, cheap and easy index of endothelial abnormalities in cardiovascular disease (Lydakis and Lip, 1998) .