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Although intensive care units treat a minority of patients, they consume a large proportion of hospital budgets. Lead author Juergen Graf from the Philipps-University Marburg, Germany, said economic constraints create pressure to ration ICU care -- and restricting demand for futile medical services by limiting access to the ICU, at least for those patients likely to die anyway, has been proposed as a way of lowering expenditures.

Graf and his colleagues conducted an assessment of health status of patients five years after discharge from the ICU, and combined this with an economic evaluation.

Of 354 patients admitted to the ICU with cardiac arrest, 204 died prior to discharge from the hospital. Of the 150 remaining, 40 died before year five, leaving 110 patients eligible for the survey.

The study, published in the journal Critical Care, said the health-related quality of life five years after discharge was only slightly lower than healthy controls of the same age and gender as the patients. The total cost for the ICU treatment of the 354 patients was almost $10 million.

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