NEW YORK – People with bleeding peptic ulcers who are admitted to a hospital on a weekend for have poorer survival than those admitted on a weekday, according to the results of a new study.
Dr. Abdel Aziz M. Shaheen, from the University of Calgary, Alberta, analyzed data from the 1993-2005 US Nationwide Inpatient Sample, featuring 237,412 admissions to 3166 hospitals for peptic ulcer-related bleeding.
Mortality was 3.4 percent among cases admitted on weekends but 3.0 percent among cases admitted on weekdays, the team reports in the medical journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Weekend-admitted patients were also more likely to undergo surgery, had longer hospital stays, and incurred greater hospital charges.
The average time before being examined by endoscopy was 2.21 days for weekend-admitted cases versus 2.06 days for those admitted on a weekday.
However, this delay did not seem to be the reason for the weekend effect on mortality, Shaheen's team states. Further studies are needed to uncover the reasons.
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