• Pediatr Crit Care Me · Sep 2011

    Enteral potassium supplementation in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit: evaluation of a practice change.

    • Brady S Moffett, Joseph W Rossano, David P Nelson, Erin McDade, and Heather A Dickerson.
    • Department of Pharmacy, Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, TX, USA. bsmoffet@texaschildrens.org
    • Pediatr Crit Care Me. 2011 Sep 1;12(5):552-4.

    BackgroundPotassium supplementation is a common practice in critically ill children, especially those with heart disease. Intravenous potassium supplementation is the standard route of administration in most intensive care units. Although the enteral route is safer and thus may be a reasonable alternative, data on the efficacy of enteral potassium administration are lacking.MethodsA change of practice to encourage use of enteral potassium was instituted in the cardiac intensive care unit at Texas Children's Hospital, and a review of this practice change was undertaken. The primary outcome of interest was the comparable efficacy of enteral and intravenous potassium administration. Patient demographic data, including urine output, diuretic use, route of potassium administration, and adverse events were documented and analyzed.ResultsSeventy-six patients met inclusion criteria and received 399 bolus doses of potassium (166 intravenous and 233 enteral). No patients became hyperkalemic after either route of administration. The increase in serum potassium was similar in both groups of patients. Side effects of the two routes of administration were not different.ConclusionsThe efficacy of enteral potassium is comparable to intravenous potassium for potassium replacement in pediatric patients after congenital heart surgery.

      Pubmed     Full text   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…

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.