The Pitt bacteraemia score is a severity of illness grading
system evaluating mental status, the presence or absence of
fever, hypotension, mechanical ventilation and cardiac status
for each patient within the time period of 2 days before and
1 day after the first positive blood cultureData on co-morbidity were collected from the National
Patient Registry (NPR)11 and used to calculate the Charlson Comorbidity
Index (CCI).12 We calculated the CCI score by gathering
diagnoses from the NPR from up to 10 years prior to the
date of SAB and excluding other diagnoses from the admission
with SAB. Diagnosis codes in the NPR were coded by physicians
at hospital discharge according to the International Classification
of Diseases, 8th revision (ICD-8), until the end of 1993 and
according to the ICD-10 thereafter.
Time to death (in days) was calculated from the day the first
positive blood culture was obtained.