Published in:
01-09-2015 | Editorial
Is sedation safe and beneficial in patients receiving NIV? No
Authors:
Giorgio Conti, Nicholas S. Hill, Stefano Nava
Published in:
Intensive Care Medicine
|
Issue 9/2015
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Excerpt
Sedation and analgesia are commonly used in the ICU to improve patient comfort and tolerance, to minimize reactions to painful stimuli and the physiologic stress response, and to modulate patient respiratory effort, drive, or timing. Although intolerance is commonly perceived as an important reason for NIV failure that should respond to sedation and analgesia, recent studies suggest that they are not used very often for that indication. Muriel et al. [
1] found that sedation and analgesia were used in “only” about 20 % of patients using NIV, confirming the results of an earlier web-survey performed in North America and Europe [
2]. Therefore, the large majority of patients (approximately 80 %) treated with NIV for acute respiratory failure do not receive any form of sedation and yet tolerate NIV and usually succeed with it [
1]. …