Noninvasive Airway Management of Comatose Patients With Acute Poisoning —Reply

In Reply In response to our recent article, Dr Schober and colleagues suggest that reduction of length of stay in the ICU and hospital may not be considered a clinically relevant outcome. However, in the context of stretched resources and ICU bed shortages, we believe this is an important end point, and that improvement in the secondary end points in our trial also advocates for a clinical benefit of the intervention. As acknowledged, the reduced risk of pneumonia in the intervention group was not statistically significant, and we therefore did not make definitive claims about this. However, considering the absolute risk reduction of 7.8% (95% CI, 0.3% to 15.9%), the supposition that withholding intubation could increase the risk of pneumonia is very unlikely. We agree that adverse events unrelated to intubation are important, but they did not appear to contribute significantly to increased morbidity risk.
Source: JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research