Prevalence of Enteral Nutrition Interruption in an Oncology Intensive Care Unit. A Prospective Observational Study

Introduction Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients are often intubated and ventilated. These patients cannot feed themselves orally, so enteral or parenteral nutrition becomes important. Various studies have suggested that meeting their nutritional demand is associated with their short and long-term outcomes. There is also ample evidence that in general ICU's, patients often do not meet their nutritional demands. (1,2) The ICU may often differ in the nature of the patients catered for and also may have very different systems of delivering healthcare provisions. This could have an impact on the patient care provided.

There are several studies suggesting that EN interruptions happen frequently in the ICU. (3,4,5) It is estimated that the EN interruption occurs in more than 85% of the patients for an average of 8-20% of the infusion time. Out of this, it is thought that 23% are avoidable in planned procedures and 65% on all occasions. (6) There is very little data on the duration of the interruptions and those associated with diagnostic procedures.

In this single-centre study, we aim to understand the prevalence of instances of missed feeding within an oncology-focused ICU in intubated patients. We looked at the reason for the delay and estimated the calorie deficit, the duration of the delay and the proportion of patients who met at least 60% of the calorie requirement. This is an important step in developing a feeding protocol to minimize such instances.

Methods This study included all intubated patients admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre from December 2022 to November 2023. The inclusion criteria were defined as adult patients above the age of 18 who were intubated and ventilated and started on enteral feeding via nasogastric tube. All patients who were not intubated and under 18 years of age were excluded.

Data will be collected from the electronic patient records. The data collected will be demographics, diagnosis, time the feed was started and stopped, delay in restarting the feed, estimated daily calorie requirement, and calorie deficit. The daily calorie requirement will be estimated using the quick calorie method using kilocalories per kilogram Table1. To estimate the actual calorie intake of the patient, the enteral feeding flowsheet of each patient was monitored, and the total intake will be calculated (mL/hr) for the whole day and based on the type of feed (High calorie, standard etc) it will be multiplied to the total intake to get the actual calorie intake.