As the discharge-death time interval increases, the proportions of both independencies and non-informative UCD increased.
After adjustment, the strength of these associations weakened, but the associations with discharge-death time interval and with category of UCD other than neoplasms remained noticeable.
Age, discharge-death time interval, length of stay, and number of stays during last year of life were included as continuous variables in order to perform trend tests.
Independence was more frequent in elder patients, as well as when the discharge-death time interval grew (14.3% when death occurred within 30 days after discharge and 27.7% within 6 to 12 months) and for UCDs other than neoplasms.
It was positively associated with the discharge-death time interval (ptrend < .0001) and negatively with length of stay (ptrend < .0001) and number of hospitalizations in the last year of life (ptrend < .0001).0001
Relative risks (RRs) of independence and their 95% confidence intervals were estimated, crude and adjusted for age, gender, discharge-death time interval, length of stay, number of stays during the last year of life, and category of UCD.
Besides, since the discharge-death time interval was imprecise for 2008, the 2008 records were considered only when death occurred in hospital, or 3 months or more after discharge (exact day of discharge available in 2009, month of discharge only in 2008).
In the second model, the interval counts were directly analysed using the proportion of deaths per time interval.
Table 4 presents leading causes of neonatal and postneonatal deaths by time interval.
When the hazard is small, which is often the case if time intervals are narrow or probability of death occurring in time interval t is low (i.e. death is a rare event), the parameter estimates from the logit and Cox models are likely to comparable.
For all deaths, including deceased patients that could not be included in the full research, additional information was collected on the cause of death and the time interval between the admission due to varicella and death.
