Endocrine Abstracts

Objectives: To analyze the most frequent consultations on patients admitted to VS sent to a medical team (T).

Material and methods: Descriptive analysis of consultations on patients admitted to the VS who suffered any medical decompensation that needed to be notified to Internal Medicine, Cardiology, Endocrinology, Nephrology or Pneumology.

Results: From February 2011 to November 2014, 173 consultations were sent from the VS Service to T. The most common consultation was ‘dyspnea’ in 62 (35.8%), followed by “pluripathology control” in 18 (10.4%), “decreased level of consciousness” in 13 (7.5%), ‘fever’ in 13 (7.5%), ‘renal failure’ in 7 (4%) and “blood pressure control” in 7 (4%) patients. The reason for the consultation was ‘poorly controlled DM’ in 8 patients (4.6%) of whom had hyperglycemia 4 (50%) and hypoglycemia, 4 (50%) as well as “control of vascular risk factors” in 18 (10.4%). However, after analysis of all patients, only 22 (12.7%) were diagnosed as decompensated DM in the discharge report.This implies a real decompensation of 23.4% of patients with known DM.

Conclusions: More than one third of the consultations for medical decompensations in the patients admitted to the VS unit correspond to dyspnea. DM is a single cause of medical decompensation in 4.6% of patients admitted to VS. However, associated with decompensation of other vascular risk factors, one out of four known diabetics had abnormal blood glucose levels. We suggest that an early evaluation of all these processes that could induce to heart failure, blood glucose and blood pressure performed by Cardiology, Endocrinology or Internal Medicine could be beneficial in terms of morbidity and hospital stay, since previous studies associate the diabetic uncontrolled in patients admitted to Vascular Surgery to an average stay 9 days superior compared to non-diabetics.