Introduction: To determine whether the provision of early standard enteral nutrition (EN) confers treatment benefits to adult trauma patients who require intensive care.
Materials and methods:MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched. Hand citation review of retrieved guidelines and systematic reviews was undertaken and academic and industry experts were contacted.
Methodologically sound randomised controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in adult trauma patients requiring intensive care that compared the delivery of standard EN, provided within 24 h of injury, to standard care were included.
The primary analysis was conducted on clinically meaningful patient-oriented outcomes, which included mortality, functional status and quality of life. Secondary analyses considered vomiting/regurgitation, pneumonia, bacteraemia, sepsis and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome. Meta-analysis was conducted using an analytical method known to minimise bias in the presence of sparse events. The impact of heterogeneity was assessed using the I 2 metric.
Results:Three RCTs with 126 participants were found to be free from major flaws and were included in the primary analysis. The provision of early EN was associated with a significant reduction in mortality (OR = 0.20, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.91,I 2
= 0). No other outcomes could be pooled. A sensitivity analysis and a confirmatory analysis conducted using a different analytical method confirmed the presence of a mortality reduction.
Conclusion:Although the detection of a statistically significant reduction in mortality is promising, overall trial quality was low and trial size was small. The results of this meta-analysis should be confirmed by the conduct of a large multi-center trial.
Introduction
Recently published clinical practice guidelines recommend initiating enteral nutrition (EN) in the trauma patient ‘as early as feasible’.
Whilst clinical practice guidelines may reduce inappropriate variability in the delivery of care by promoting awareness of interventions of proven benefit and discouraging
ineffective care, they do not always result in practice change. Practice change is more likely to occur if guideline recommendations are supported by clear evidence of patient benefit. Previously published meta-analyses have assessed the effectiveness of early EN in various patient groups including acutely hospitalised medical patients, critically ill patients, burns patients, patients undergoing elective intestinal surgery and patients with pancreatitis. Although the provision of early EN has been demonstrated to significantly reduce infectious complications in acutely hospitalised patients, and to significantly reduce mortality in critically ill patients and patients undergoing elective intestinal surgery, there have been no meta-analyses published with a primary focus on the trauma patient. The purpose of this project was to identify and synthesise the current evidence from methodologically sound randomised controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in adult trauma patients requiring intensive care to determine whether the provision of early standard EN confers a treatment benefit, on average, in the identified studies.