Objectives: Physiologically, most critically ill patients are under stress conditions from a variety of insults, which are ultimately lean body wasting and hypoalbuminemia. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical impacts of using modular protein formulas (MPFs)to increase protein provision in critically ill patients who are used standard enteral nutritional formulas (ENFs) in terms of average serum albumin level during first week of intensive care unit (ICU) admission (ALB avg) in survivor group (Group I) and nonsurvivors group (Group II).
Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of patients admitted to the adult ICU between April 2017 and January 2019 Patients were excluded if they discharged from ICU or died before completed 1 week of ICU admission.All patient’s continuous variables were expressed as mean± SD by using the independent samples T-test or as numbers with percentages by using χ2 test.
Results: The mean overall age was 56.92±9.55 years and 50 subjects (66.66%) were male. The overall 28-day ICU mortality rate was 22.67% (17 patients). Although there were insignificant nutritional inputs difference between survivors and nonsurvivors, the ALB avg was significantly higher in survivors than in nonsurvivors (3.93±0.49 g/dl vs 2.73±0.89 g/dl) with mean difference of +1.08±0.43 g/dl.
Conclusion: We demonstrate the importance of provision protein to fill the protein gap deficit that are highly expected in critically ill patients who are taking standard ENFs.MPFs are effective to increase or at least to stabilize serum albumin level in hypercatabolic critically ill patients which ultimately may improve survival rate.