Morelli, Tommaso Geraldo, Purcell, Martha, Keating, Anluan, Freeman, Anna, Staples, Karl J., Rodrigues, Pedro, Jones, Abigail, Allen, Alexander, Clark, Tristan and Wilkinson, Tom (2026) Understanding risk of poor outcomes in adults hospitalised with respiratory syncytial virus infection: evidence from a multicentre UK cohort. Thorax. (doi:10.1136/thorax-2025-224192).
Abstract
Background : respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes substantial winter pressure on adult services. In the UK, RSV vaccination currently targets adults aged ≥75 years and care home residents; it remains uncertain whether this age criterion alone meaningfully discriminates risk of poor outcome among adults hospitalised with RSV.
Methods: we pooled three UK hospital cohorts (one prospective, two retrospective) of adults admitted with acute respiratory infection (ARI) and PCR-confirmed RSV. The primary outcome was ICU/HDU admission or all-cause mortality within 60 days. Prespecified predictors (age, sex and comorbidities) entered a LASSO-penalised logistic regression; selected variables were refitted using standard logistic regression. Discrimination, calibration and decision-analytic performance were assessed using 1,000-bootstrap internal validation and decision-curve analysis.
Results: among 334 adults, 37 (11.1%) experienced the primary outcome. An age-only rule mirroring current UK vaccine age-eligibility (≥75 years) demonstrated only modest discrimination (optimism-adjusted AUC 0.58, 95% CI 0.48–0.65) and a compressed distribution of predicted risks. A four-predictor model—including age, COPD, active/previous cancer and dementia—achieved higher discrimination AUC [0.77 (0.69–0.85)], a wider spread of predicted risks, and the greatest net benefit across clinically plausible escalation thresholds (5–20%).
Conclusions: in adults hospitalised with RSV-associated ARI, simple age-based heuristics—including the UK ≥75year threshold—showed only modest ability to discriminate risk of ICU/HDU admission/60-day mortality once hospitalised. Comorbidity-inclusive approaches may provide more informative hospital level risk stratification and warrant evaluation in future RSV vaccine-effectiveness and outcome studies. Any application requires external validation, more systematic RSV testing, and comparison with physiology-based scores in larger, vaccinated cohorts.
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