The influence of the day of the week of hospital admission on the prognosis of stroke patients

This study aimed to evaluate the weekday and weekend distribution of stroke case hospital admissions and their respective prognosis based on a sample from the Estudo de Mortalidade e Morbidade do Acidente Vascular Cerebral (EMMA), a cohort of stroke patients admitted to a community hospital in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. We ascertained all consecutive cases of first-time strokes between April 2006 and December 2008 and performed a subsequent one-year follow-up. No association was found between frequency of hospital admissions due to ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes and the specific day of the week on which the admission occurred. However, ten-day and twelve-month case-fatality was higher in hemorrhagic stroke patients admitted at the weekend. We also found that intracerebral hemorrhage patients admitted on weekends had a worse survival rate (50%) compared with those admitted during weekdays (25.6%, P log-rank = 0.03). We found a multivariate hazard ratio of 2.49 (95% CI: 1.10-5.81, P trend = 0.03) for risk of death at the weekend compared to weekdays for intracerebral hemorrhage cases. No difference in survival was observed with respect to the overall sample of stroke or ischemic stroke patients.