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James Maurer, MD
Christopher Abularrage

James Turner, MD; Fred Weinbaum, MD
The New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens Flushing

JAMA. 1993;270(15):1810-1811.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In response to the review by Cohen et al¹ in the February 24 issue of JAMA, we retrospectively studied patients treated in our 12-bed surgical intensive care unit (SICU). Our hospital is a 487-bed community hospital with a level I trauma center. It has separate surgical, medical, respiratory, and coronary care units. The SICU is staffed by full-time surgical intensivists who supervise the care of critically ill patients on all the surgical subspecialties. We analyzed the care of octogenarians and nonagenarians who were admitted to the SICU and mechanically ventilated for at least 3 days to determine SICU mortality rates and hospital mortality rates. We determined long-term survival and quality of life.

From January 1 until December 31, 1990, there were 356 patient admissions to the SICU. Eighty-five percent of these patients survived their ICU stay. Ninety-seven (27%) of the admissions were for octogenarians or nonagenarians . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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