Laxative use and 28-day mortality in critically ill sepsis patients: a retrospective cohort study using MIMIC-IV (v3.1).

Summary: When hospital patients get very sick with a blood infection called sepsis, they often need medicine to help them go to the bathroom. Doctors looked at over 7,000 patient records to see which medicines worked best. They found that a medicine called Docusate Sodium was the safest. Patients who took it lived longer and got out of the intensive care unit (ICU) faster. Another medicine called Lactulose was linked to worse results, but this might be because patients taking it already had bad liver problems. The main takeaway is that choosing the right bathroom medicine can help very sick patients get better faster.