• Junru Wen, Hai Zeng, Zunjiang Li, Guoxin He, and Yueling Jin.
• Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2018 Dec 1; 97 (52): e13881e13881.

BackgroundDelirium is common in adult patients undergoing cardiac surgery and related to a high morbidity and mortality. Although a variety of pharmacologic interventions have been applied in delirium prevention, there is still uncertainty concerning which drug is optimal. Thus, we plan to conduct a systematic review and network meta-analysis (NMA) of published studies to assess the efficacy and safety of pharmacologic interventions for preventing delirium among those patients.MethodsA systematic literature search will be conducted in Embase, PubMed, and the Cochrane Library. The primary outcome will be the incidence of postoperative delirium. Secondary outcomes will include all-cause mortality and length of hospital or intensive care unit stay. A frequentist NMA will be conducted using Stata version 14.0. The inconsistency between direct and indirect comparisons will be evaluated using a node splitting method. In addition, surface under the cumulative ranking area will be used to evaluate superiority of different treatments.ResultsThe findings of our review will be submitted to a peer-reviewed publication.ConclusionOur study will generate convincing evidence regarding the effectiveness and safety of different pharmacologic interventions for delirium prevention in cardiac surgery patients.

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