For babies born with heart defects, surgery can be lifesaving but still carries real risks. Doctors at one hospital looked at a simple blood test measure called the red cell distribution width-to-albumin ratio, or RAR, to see if it could help identify infants more likely to die during their hospital stay.
They reviewed records for 3,634 infants who had heart surgery between 2017 and 2021. The key finding was that a higher RAR (above 1.35) was linked to roughly double the odds of in-hospital death compared to a lower ratio. This was based on an odds ratio of 2.16, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.01 to 4.60 and a p-value less than 0.05. The study did not report specific numbers of deaths or other detailed outcomes.
This was a retrospective look at patients from a single hospital, so we can’t say the ratio causes worse outcomes, only that it’s associated with them. It also doesn’t tell us whether changing the ratio would improve survival. Still, RAR is easy to get from routine blood work, which makes it a practical tool worth exploring further in broader groups of infants.