This study aimed to develop and validate a nomogram for predicting 28-day and 90-day mortality in intensive care unit (ICU) patients who have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) coexisting with congestive heart failure (CHF).

An extensive analysis was conducted on clinical data from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV database, covering patients over 18 years old with both COPD and CHF, who were were first-time ICU admissions between 2008 and 2019. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression method was employed to screen clinical features, with the final model being optimized using backward stepwise regression guided by the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) to construct the nomogram. The predictive model's discrimination and clinical applicability were evaluated via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, calibration curves, the C-index, and decision curve analysi s (DCA).

This analysis was comprised of a total of 1948 patients. Patients were separated into developing and validation cohorts in a 7:3 ratio, with similar baseline characteristics between the two groups. The ICU mortality rates for the developing and verification cohorts were 20.8 % and 19.5 % at 28 days, respectively, and 29.4 % and 28.3 % at 90 days, respectively. The clinical characteristics retained by the backward stepwise regression include age, weight, systolic blood pressure (SBP), respiratory rate (RR), oxygen saturation (SpO2), red blood cell distribution width (RDW), lactate, partial thrombosis time (PTT), race, marital status, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), malignant cancer, acute kidney failure (AKF), pneumonia, immunosuppressive drugs, antiplatelet agents, vasoactive agents, acute physiology score III (APS III), Oxford acute severity of illness score (OASIS), and Charlson comorbidity index (CCI). We developed two separate models by assigning weighted scores to each independent risk factor: nomogram A excludes CCI but includes age, T2DM, and malignant cancer, while nomogram B includes only CCI, without age, T2DM, and malignant cancer. Based on the results of the AUC and C-index, this study selected nomogram A, which demonstrated better predictive performance, for subsequent validation. The calibration curve, C-index, and DCA results indicate that nomogram A has good accuracy in predicting short-term mortality and demonstrates better discriminative ability than commonly used clinical scoring systems, making it more suitable for clinical application.

The nomogram developed in this study offers an effective assessment of short-term mortality risk for ICU patients with COPD and CHF, proving to be a superior tool for predicting their short-term prognosis.