Development and validation of a risk nomogram to estimate risk of hyponatremia after spinal cord injury: A retrospective single-center study.

Objective: This study aimed to establish a nomogram-based assessment for predicting the risk of hyponatremia after spinal cord injury (SCI).

Design: The study is a retrospective single-center study.

Participants: SCI patients hospitalized in the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University.

Setting: The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi, China.

Methods: We performed a retrospective clinical study to collect SCI patients hospitalized in the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University from 2016 to 2020. Based on their clinical scores, the SCI patients were grouped as either hyponatremic or non-hyponatremic, SCI patients in 2016-2019 were identified as the training set, and patients in 2020 were identified as the test set. A nomogram was generated, the calibration curve, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and decision curve analysis (DCA) were used to validate the model.

Results: A total of 895 SCI patients were retrieved. After excluding patients with incomplete data, 883 patients were finally included in this study and used to construct the nomograms. The indicators used in the nomogram included sex, completeness of SCI, pneumonia, urinary tract infection, fever, constipation, white blood cell (WBC), albumin and serum Ca. These indices were determined by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression analysis. The C-index of the model was 0.81, the area under the curve (AUC) of the training set was 0.82(Cl:0.79-0.85), and the validation set was 0.79(Cl:0.73-0.85).

Conclusions: Nomogram has good predictive ability, sex, completeness of SCI, pneumonia, urinary tract infection, fever, constipation, WBC, albumin and serum Ca were predictors of hyponatremia after SCI.