Ethnic Disparities in Deep Sedation of Patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome in the United States: Secondary Analysis of a Multicenter Randomized Trial.

Rationale: Patients identified as Hispanic, the largest minority group in the United States, are more likely to die from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) than non-Hispanic patients. Mechanisms to explain this disparity remain unidentified. However, Hispanic patients may be at risk of overexposure to deep sedation because of language differences between patients and clinicians, and deep sedation is associated with higher ARDS mortality.Objective: We examined associations between Hispanic ethnicity and exposure to deep sedation among patients with ARDS.Methods: A secondary analysis was conducted of patients enrolled in the control arm of a randomized trial of neuromuscular blockade for ARDS across 48 U.S. hospitals. Exposure to deep sedation was measured over the first 5 days that a patient was alive and received mechanical ventilation. Multilevel mixed-effects models were used to evaluate associations between Hispanic ethnicity and exposure to deep sedation, controlling for patient characteristics.Results: Patients identified as Hispanic had approximately five times the odds of deep sedation (odds ratio, 4.98; 95% confidence interval, 2.02-12.28; P < 0.0001) on a given day, compared with non-Hispanic White patients. Hospitals with at least one enrolled Hispanic patient kept all enrolled patients deeply sedated longer than hospitals without any enrolled Hispanic patients (85.8% of ventilator-days vs. 65.5%; P < 0.001).Conclusions: Hispanic patients are at higher risk of exposure to deep sedation than non-Hispanic White patients. There is an urgent need to understand and address disparities in sedation delivery.

Rural-Urban Differences in Mortality among Mechanically Ventilated Patients in Intensive and Intermediate Care.

Rationale: Intermediate care (also termed "step-down" or "moderate care") has been proposed as a lower cost alternative to care for patients who may not clearly benefit from intensive care unit admission. Intermediate care units may be appealing to hospitals in financial crisis, including those in rural areas. Outcomes of patients receiving intermediate care are not widely described. Objectives: To examine relationships among rurality, location of care, and mortality for mechanically ventilated patients. Methods: Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years and older who received invasive mechanical ventilation between 2010 and 2019 were included. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the association between admission to a rural or an urban hospital and 30-day mortality, with separate analyses for patients in general, intermediate, and intensive care. Models were adjusted for age, sex, area deprivation index, primary diagnosis, severity of illness, year, comorbidities, and hospital volume. Results: There were 2,752,492 hospitalizations for patients receiving mechanical ventilation from 2010 to 2019, and 193,745 patients (7.0%) were in rural hospitals. The proportion of patients in rural intermediate care increased from 4.1% in 2010 to 6.3% in 2019. Patient admissions to urban hospitals remained relatively stable. Patients in rural and urban intensive care units had similar adjusted 30-day mortality, at 46.7% (adjusted absolute risk difference -0.1% [95% confidence interval, -0.7% to 0.6%]; P = 0.88). However, adjusted 30-day mortality for patients in rural intermediate care was significantly higher (36.9%) than for patients in urban intermediate care (31.3%) (adjusted absolute risk difference 5.6% [95% confidence interval, 3.7% to 7.6%]; P < 0.001). Conclusions: Hospitalization in rural intermediate care was associated with increased mortality. There is a need to better understand how intermediate care is used across hospitals and to carefully evaluate the types of patients admitted to intermediate care units.

Social jobs and the returns to drinking.

We uniquely show that the returns to drinking in social jobs exceed those in non-social jobs. The higher returns remain when controlling for worker personality, when including individual fixed effects and in a series of robustness exercises. This showing fits the hypothesis that drinking assists the formation of social capital, capital that has greater value in social jobs. We are also the first to show that drinking may proxy both general and specific social capital formation. Drinking during a previous employer and during a current employer have returns and each have higher returns in a current social job.