The association between admission blood urea nitrogen levels with in-hospital and long-term mortality in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the association of blood urine nitrogen (BUN) levels with all-causemortality in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI).Method: This study included 3778 patients with STEMI treated with primary percutaneous coronary intervention. Anadmission BUN of 17.5 mg/dL was identified through a ROC analysis as an optimal cutoff value to predict the inhospitalmortality with 68% sensitivity and 66% specificity (AUC: 0.75; 95% CI:0.72-0.88; p < 0.001).Results: The patients were followed up for a mean period of 33±0.14 months. Patients with higher BUN levels had 5.3-times higher in-hospital (OR: 6.0, 95% CI: 4.4-8.3) and 5-times higher long-term (HR: 5.3, 95% CI: 4.2-6.8) mortalityrates than patients with lower BUN levels.Conclusions: This study demonstrated that elevated BUN level was independently associated with increased in-hospitaland long-term mortality. BUN test is a simple, inexpensive, and easily bedside applicable method. Hence, it can be usedto detect high-risk patients in the setting of STEMI.Keywords: Blood urine nitrogen; ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction; primary percutaneous coronaryintervention; mortality