Clinical picture of the duration of venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation: analysis from JROAD-DPC

Venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) has been widely used for critically ill patients all over the world; however, comprehensive survey regarding the relationship between VA-ECMO duration and prognosis is limited. We conducted a survey of VA-ECMO patients in the Japanese Registry of All Cardiac and Vascular Diseases-Diagnosis Procedure Combination (JROAD-DPC), which was a health insurance claim database study among cardiovascular centers associated with the Japan Circulation Society, between April 2012 and March 2016. Out of 13,542 VA-ECMO patients, we analyzed 5766 cardiovascular patients treated with VA-ECMO. 68% patients used VA-ECMO only for 1 day and 93% had VA-ECMO terminated within 1 week. In multivariate analysis, the hazard ratio of 1-day support was significantly high at 1.72 (95% confidence intervals; 95% CI 1.53–1.95) (p < 0.001), while that of 2-day [0.60 (95% CI 0.49–0.73)], 3-day [0.75 (95% CI 0.60–0.94)], 4-day [0.43 (95% CI 0.31–0.60)] and 5-day support [0.62 (95% CI 0.44–0.86)] was significantly low. Comprehensive database analysis of JROAD-DPC revealed that cardiovascular patients who were supported with VA-ECMO for 2–5 days showed lower mortality. The optimal VA-ECMO support window should be investigated in further studies.