Author Interviews, Critical Care - Intensive Care - ICUs, JAMA, Mental Health Research / 22.02.2018
Study Finds No Benefit To Prophylactic Haldol For Delirium in ICU
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Mark van den Boogaard, PhD, RN, CCRN
Assistant Professor
Department of Intensive Care Medicine
Radboud University Medical Center
Nijmegen Netherlands
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Delirium is affecting many of our intensive care unit (ICU) patients which is impacting their recovery on the short-term as well as on the long-term. Therefore we were very interested to investigate if the use prophylactic haloperidol would be beneficial for the ICU patients. Especially because there were indications that it would be effective in ICU delirium prevention and also because this drug is being used in daily practice to prevent ICU delirium although there is no clear evidence. The overall finding of our large-scale well designed study is that we didn’t find any beneficial effect of prophylactic haloperidol in ICU patients. Moreover, this finding is very consistent over all groups of patients. (more…)