Acute Kidney Injury Classification for Critically Ill Cirrhotic Patients: A Comparison of the KDIGO, AKIN, and RIFLE Classifications

Critically ill cirrhotic patients have high mortality rates, particularly when they present with acute kidney injury (AKI) on admission. The Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) group aimed to standardize the definition of AKI and recently published a new AKI classification. However, the efficacy of the KDIGO classification for predicting outcomes of critically ill cirrhotic patients is unclear. We prospectively enrolled 242 cirrhotic patients from a 10-bed specialized hepatogastroenterology intensive care unit (ICU) in a 2000-bed tertiary-care referral hospital. Demographic parameters and clinical variables on day 1 of admission were prospectively recorded. The overall in-hospital mortality rate was 62.8%. Liver diseases were usually attributed to hepatitis B viral infection (26.9%). The major cause of ICU admission was upper gastrointestinal bleeding (38.0%). Our result showed that the KDIGO classification had better discriminatory power than RIFLE and AKIN criteria in predicting in-hospital mortality. Cumulative survival rates at the 6-month after hospital discharge differed significantly between patients with and without AKI on ICU admission day. In summary, we identified that the outcome prediction performance of KDIGO classification is superior to that of AKIN or RIFLE classification in critically ill cirrhotic patients.