Introduction:

Stroke is associated with high morbidity and mortality. It is important to identify the factors associated with severity and thus, a worse prognosis. For this reason, our objective was to explore the factors associated with stroke severity in a third-level hospital.

Material and methods:

We conducted a retrospective and observational study. We included subjects with a diagnosis of stroke. We dichotomized the sample by Glasgow < 13 or ≥ 13. We used a Mann Whitney U test to compare non-normal continuous variables and a Fisher’s exact test and Pearson’s χ2 test for categorical variables. We used a bivariate Spearman correlation and OR to look for the association between risk factors and stroke severity.

Results:

We included 87 subjects with a diagnosis of stroke. Obesity was a risk factor associated with poor outcomes (OR 3.4, 95% CI 1.09-11, p = 0.04). The NIHSS score reached an area under the curve of 0.85 (95% CI 0.73-0.97) to predict a Glasgow score < 13 points and an NIHSS ≥ 8 points were strongly associated with stroke severity (OR 33.8, 7.1-161.3).

Conclusion:

In our study, the factors statistically significantly associated with a worse prognosis were obesity and an NIHSS score ≥ 8 points.