Nutrition support practices in critically ill head-injured patients: a global perspective.

A new study on Critical Care Journal describes international nutrition support practices in critically ill head-injured patients.

Given that critical illness following head injury is associated with a hypermetabolic state, the study major finding was that nutritional deficits are commonplace and these deficits are associated with a delay to discharge alive.

The study, based on a dataset of >10,000 patient days from 1,045 patients, showed that head-injured patients were significantly underfed and that generalised predictive equations have been shown to be somewhat inaccurate in determining nutritional needs of head-injured patients when compared to more direct yet invasive methodology such as indirect calorimetry

The study can be downloaded at the following link: click here