PhD Scientific Days 2022

Clinical Medicine III.

The Effectiveness and Safety of Protocolized Sedation in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

Text of the abstract

Introduction
Mechanically ventilated patients in the pediatric ICU (PICU) require sedation to facilitate care, minimize discomfort, reduce the risk of self-injury and to ensure humane treatment. However, oversedation can prolong duration of ventilation and ICU stay, which may compromise overall recovery. Implementation of novel strategies to minimize sedative exposure and to optimize sedation management are crucial to improve treatment of the critically ill.

Aims
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of protocol-directed sedation management compared to conventional sedation management in the mechanically ventilated PICU population.

Methods
We performed a comprehensive search in 5 medical databases on October 9, 2021. Included studies compared protocol-directed sedation management to conventional sedation regimen in critically ill pediatric patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). The GRADE method was used to assess certainty of evidence. Our main outcomes were the duration of IMV, ICU length of stay (LOS), in-hospital LOS, ICU mortality and the incidence of adverse events. Pooled odds ratios (OR) for binary outcomes and mean differences (MD) for continuous outcomes with 95% CIs were calculated using a random-effects model.

Results
We included 18 studies (2 cluster and 2 pilot RCTs, 7 prospective and 7 retrospective cohort studies) with a total of 13703 participants comparing protocolized sedation to conventional care. There was no clear evidence of difference in duration of IMV (MD -6.52 hours, 95% CI -18.01 to 4,97; I2 =46%), in ICU LOS (MD -0.60 days, 95% CI -1.72 to 0.51; I2 =60%), in in-hospital LOS (MD -0.77 days, 95% CI -2.74 to 1.20; I2 =86%) and in ICU mortality (OR 1.13, 95% CI 0.92 to 1.37; I2 =0%). We found no significant difference in the incidence of adverse events.

Conclusion
Our results did not show superiority of protocolized sedation regarding our main outcomes; however, the reported high degree of statistical heterogeneity limited the interpretation of our results. Further RCTs need to be conducted to produce sufficient, high-quality evidence assessing the effectiveness of protocol-directed sedation in the PICU population.

Funding
None.