• Can J Anaesth · Feb 2024

    Physicians' beliefs and perceived importance of traumatic brain injury-associated agitation in critically ill patients: a survey of Canadian intensivists.

    • Mar Saavedra-Mitjans, Anne Julie Frenette, Victoria A McCredie, Lisa Burry, Caroline Arbour, Sangeeta Mehta, Emmanuel Charbonney, Han Ting Wang, Martin Albert, Francis Bernard, and David Williamson.
    • Faculty of Pharmacy, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada. mar.saavedra.mitjans@umontreal.ca.
    • Can J Anaesth. 2024 Feb 1; 71 (2): 264273264-273.

    PurposeAgitation is a common behavioural problem following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Intensive care unit (ICU) physicians' perspectives regarding TBI-associated agitation are unknown. Our objective was to describe physicians' beliefs and perceived importance of TBI-associated agitation in critically ill patients.MethodsFollowing current standard guidance, we built an electronic, self-administrated, 42-item survey, pretested it for reliability and validity, and distributed it to 219 physicians working in 18 ICU level-1 trauma centres in Canada. We report the results using descriptive statistics.ResultsThe overall response rate was 93/219 (42%), and 76/93 (82%) respondents completed the full survey. Most respondents were men with ten or more years of experience. Respondents believed that pre-existing dementia (90%) and regular recreational drug use (86%) are risk factors for agitation. Concerning management, 91% believed that the use of physical restraints could worsen agitation, 90% believed that having family at the bedside reduces agitation, and 72% believed that alpha-2 adrenergic agonists are efficacious for managing TBI agitation. Variability was observed in beliefs on epidemiology, sex, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and other pharmacologic options. Respondents considered TBI agitation frequent enough to justify the implementation of management protocols (87%), perceived the current level of clinical evidence on TBI agitation management to be insufficient (84%), and expressed concerns about acute and long-term detrimental outcomes and burden to patients, health care professionals, and relatives (85%).ConclusionTraumatic brain injury-associated agitation in critically ill patients was perceived as an important issue for most ICU physicians. Physicians agreed on multiple approaches to manage TBI-associated agitation although agreement on epidemiology and risk factors was variable.© 2023. Canadian Anesthesiologists' Society.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…