부산대학교 도서관

Background: Bronchiolitis is common in children < 2 years. No previous studies have combined electronic outpatient, emergency department (ED), and inpatient data to define a care episode and measure total utilization during the course of illness.Objective: We describe bronchiolitis episodes by chronological and gestational age (GA) in a large multi-ethnic cohort.Design/Methods: Retrospective study involving 125,031 infants =32 weeks GA We defined an episode as a time period that: 1) included ICD-9 codes for bronchiolitis, 2) a bronchiolitis-related code 2 days prior and 3) ended with a bronchiolitis code followed by 14 clear days.Results: We identified 18,401 infants who had a care episode of bronchiolitis in the first two years (14.7%). These 18,401 infants had 21,789 episodes. Most (59.6%) episodes involved only a single outpatient or ED encounter. Approximately 8,663 care episodes were longer than 1 day with a mean duration of 7.05.8(SD) days and a median of 5.0 days. Rate and mean duration of episodes varied by GA from 23% and 4.5±5.5 days for babies born at 32- 33 weeks to 13.6% and 3.2±4.5 days for babies born at 40 weeks. For infants < 6 months the proportion of episodes including a hospitalization was 11.7%; this proportion was 6% for infants aged 6 to 24 months.Conclusions: The rate of bronchiolitis is high during the first two years, but most care episodes involve a single encounter. Younger GA is associated with increasing frequency and duration of bronchiolitis episodes suggesting more severe disease.The study was sponsored by MedImmune.