Should nasogastric tube be used routinely in patients undergoing cardiac surgery? A narrative review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIM: Nasogastric tube (NGT) use has been common in the immediate postoperative period in surgical patients for decades. Potential advantages include the decompression of gastric contents and the early administration of time-sensitive medications. However, its routine use after cardiac surgery has not been established as a gold standard yet. The NGT use for prevention of postoperative nausea and vomiting has been a matter of debate in literature. Also, NGT use has also been associated with the incidence of some respiratory and gastrointestinal complications and it may be a source of significant pain and discomfort to patients. In this article, we review the current available literature regarding the use of NGT during and immediately after cardiac surgery, with particular emphasis on its potential role in enhanced postoperative recovery. METHODS: We performed a database search in October 2021 using Embase, Cochrane Library, and Medline to identify studies that examined the use of NGT in patients that underwent cardiac surgery. Data and literature about NGT's impact on post-operative nausea and vomiting, early administration of medications, interference with imaging, post-operative complications, respiratory complications, gastrointestinal complications, pain and discomfort, and enhanced recovery after surgery were examined. RESULTS: Three reports investigating the use of NGT to reduce post-operative nausea and vomiting were examined with sample sizes of 114, 104, and 202. The use of NGT did not significantly reduce the incidence of post-operative nausea and vomiting in 2/3 of the studies: a 2% nausea reduction with NGT (p < 0.05), a 7.7% nausea reduction with NGT (p = 0.6), and a 14% vomiting reduction with NGT (p = 0.007). The prevalence of pneumonia following NGT use has been shown to vary ranging from 4 to 95% with associated mortality rates of 17 to 62%. CONCLUSION: Based on our findings, there is currently not sufficient evidence to support the routine use of NGT during cardiac surgery. Further research is needed to establish the role of NGT in this patient population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".