Purpose

Delirium is a common neurocognitive disorder in patients with advanced cancer and is associated with poor clinical outcomes. As a potentially reversible phenomenon, early recognition of delirium by identifying the risk factors demands attention. To develop a model to predict the occurrence of delirium in hospitalized patients with advanced cancer.

Materials and Methods

This retrospective study included patients with advanced cancer admitted to the oncology ward of four tertiary cancer centers in Korea for supportive cares and excluded those discharged due to death. The primary endpoint was occurrence of delirium. Sociodemographic characteristics, clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, and concomitant medication were investigated for associating variables. The predictive model developed using multivariate logistic regression was internally validated by bootstrapping.

Results

From January 2019 to December 2020, 2,152 patients were enrolled. The median age of patients was 64 years, and 58.4% were male. A total of 127 patients (5.9%) developed delirium during hospitalization. In multivariate logistic regression, age, body mass index, hearing impairment, previous delirium history, length of hospitalization, chemotherapy during hospitalization, blood urea nitrogen and calcium levels, and concomitant anti-depressant use were significantly associated with the occurrence of delirium. The predictive model combining all four categorized variables showed the best performance among the developed models (area under the curve 0.831, sensitivity 80.3%, and specificity 72.0%). The calibration plot showed optimal agreement between predicted and actual probabilities through internal validation of the final model.

Conclusions

We proposed a successful predictive model for the risk of delirium in hospitalized patients with advanced cancer.