Epidural vs. Systemic Analgesia in the Intensive Care Unit

NCT04996524 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 647

Last updated 2024-03-15

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Many patients admitted to the general intensive care unit suffer from pain, whether acute or chronic. Those patients include post-operative patients, multi trauma, acute pancreatitis and patients with multiple rib fractures. Most patients in the intensive care unit, whether intubated and ventilated or not, are treated with systemic analgesic drugs, usually given intravenously, enterally, or trans dermally (fentanyl patches).

Continuous epidural anesthesia has been shown in several studies to have an advantage over systemic analgesia in specific conditions, such as pancreatitis, multiple rib fractures and upper abdominal surgeries. Some of its benefits include improved gastrointestinal motility (reduction of ileus rates), decreased thromboembolic events (DVT) and better quality of pain control. In intubated and ventilated patients, continuous epidural anesthesia may reduce the amount of required systemic sedation. Reducing the amount of sedation may contribute to a decrease in delirium rates, shortening the time to extubation and reducing other adverse effects associated with high requirements of sedation drugs (such as a decrease in blood pressure).

Most of the studies comparing systemic analgesia to epidural analgesia examined a population of patients hospitalized in the surgical ward, post breast, abdominal or orthopedic surgeries of the pelvis and lower extremities, or due to other conditions such as pancreatitis or multiple rib fractures. There are almost no studies that have examined the effectiveness of epidural analgesia in patients admitted to the intensive care unit, including sedated and ventilated patients, compared with systemic analgesia.

From 2011 until today, our intensive care unit has admitted about 300 patients who were treated with continuous epidural analgesia. In this study we would like to compare them to another group of patients (about 300 patients as well), who were admitted to the unit for similar etiologies (post-operative, multi- trauma, pancreatitis, etc.), and to observe differences between the groups. We would like to examine differences in mortality within 28 days, as well as differences in morbidity, such as the level of analgesia and delirium rates between groups.

Conditions

  • Patients With Acute Pain Admitted to the Intensive Care Unit

Interventions

DRUG

epidural analgesia

Patients recieving epidural analgesia instead of systemic analgesia for acute pain in the intensive care unit

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Meir Medical Center

    lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
99 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-08-01
Primary Completion
2023-04-01
Completion
2023-04-01

Countries

  • Israel

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04996524 on ClinicalTrials.gov