Development and validation of a nomogram to predict hypothermia in adult burn patients during escharectomy under general anesthesia

It is very common for burn patients to have hypothermia during escharectomy under general anesthesia, which increases the blood transfusion demand of burn patients, and may lead to blood coagulation disorder or even increase the mortality of patients. It is important to predict the occurrence of hypothermia in advance, but we lack a prognostic prediction model. Our study aimed to develop a nomogram to predict the incidence of hypothermia in adult burn patients undergoing escharectomy under general anesthesia to intervention the hazards associated with hypothermia early. This retrospective study included 978 adult burn patients who underwent simple escharectomy under general anesthesia during hospitalization between January 2017 and December 2022, they were further divided into a training cohort and a validation cohort. The clinical data were recorded in electronic medical record system and a self-made collection table of intraoperative hypothermia. The preliminary predictive factors for hypothermia which undergoing simple escharectomy under general anesthesia in burn patients were determined using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) at first, then the final predictive factors determined using binary logistic regression analyses and a nomogram to predict the occurrence of hypothermia was established. The index of concordance(C-index), calibration curves, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and decision curve analysis (DCA) were used to evaluate the performance of the model. A total of 211 patients with hypothermia and 767 patients without hypothermia were selected. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression analysis and binary logistic regression results concluded that burn index, urinary volume, blood transfusion volume and irrigation volume were significantly associated with hypothermia in burn patients undergoing escharectomy under general anesthesia. The nomogram based on these four variables had good predictive efficiency for hypothermia in adult burn patients during escharectomy under general anesthesia, the C-index in the training cohort was 0.903, areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUROC) of for the training cohort (95 % CI 0.877–0.920) and 0.875 for the validation cohort (95 % CI 0.852–0.897) indicated satisfactory discriminative ability of the nomogram, and the calibration curves for the training cohort and the validation cohort also fit as well, indicating that the nomogram had good clinical application value. Hypothermia in burn patients during escharectomy under general anesthesia is associated with burn index, urinary volume, blood transfusion volume and irrigation volume. We successfully developed a practical nomogram to accurately predict hypothermia, which is a practical method helping clinicians rapidly and conveniently diagnose and guide the treatment of hypothermia in burn patients during escharectomy under general anesthesia.