Intravenous Contrast Isn't Associated with Adverse Outcomes

In a recent retrospective study from Mayo Clinic, researchers demonstrated that intravenous contrast material was not associated with acute kidney injury (i.e., increase in serum creatinine level of ≥0.5 mg/dL) during the 72 hours after computed tomography (CT) of the chest, abdomen, or pelvis (NEJM JW Gen Med Apr 10 2014). Now, the team has examined two “hard” outcomes — dialysis and death.

Using propensity-score matching, two groups of about 10,000 patients each were created from a large database; these groups were virtually identical in clinical characteristics, except that one group had undergone contrast-enhanced CT and the other had undergone unenhanced CT. The 30-day incidences of dialysis (≈0.2%) and mortality (≈8%) after CT scanning…