An overview of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube placement in the intensive care unit.

Critically ill patients are at increased risk for malnutrition as they often have underlying acute and chronic illness, stress related catabolism, decreased appetite, trauma and ongoing inflammation. Malnutrition is recognized as a leading cause of adverse outcomes, higher mortality, and increased hospital costs. Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tubes provide a safe and effective route to provide supplemental enteral nutrition to these patients. PEG placement has essentially replaced surgical gastrostomy as the modality of choice for longer term feeding in patients. This is a highly prevalent procedure with 160,000 to 200,000 PEG procedures performed each year in the United States. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of current knowledge and practice standards with regards to placement of PEG tube in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). When a patient is considered for a PEG tube, it is important to evaluate the treatment alternatives and identify the best option for each patient. In this review, we provide the advantages and disadvantages of various feeding modalities and devices. We review the indications and contraindications for PEG tube placement as well as the risks of this procedure. We then describe in detail the per-oral pull, per-oral push, and direct percutaneous techniques for PEG tube placement. Additionally, we review the feasibility of having interventional pulmonologists place PEG tubes in the ICU.

Contemporaneous relationship between substance abuse treatment and poly-substance use: evidence from the Persistent Effect of Treatment Studies.

Data from the Persistent Effect of Treatment Studies (PETS) are used to explore the relationship between duration of substance use treatment and simultaneous poly-substance using behaviors. Studying such contemporaneous relationships is especially important given the chronic nature of the substance-using population (McLellan, 2002) in the PETS study. Data were collected at intake to treatment programs and follow-up interviews were performed periodically at treatment program sites. One of the features of the analysis was the development of a poly-substance scale to measure multiple substance use. Multilevel models were implemented to examine the relationship between three levels of care (i.e., intensive outpatient, outpatient, and residential) and simultaneous poly-substance use. Contemporaneous effects of treatment were obtained such that higher duration of treatment was associated with drops in substance-using behaviors. This result supports the need for sustaining treatment for a population of chronic substance abusers.