Publications by authors named "Sascha C A T Verbruggen"

Objective: Early mobilisation in critically ill children is safe and feasible. However, the effectiveness of early mobilisation on short- and long-term outcomes is understudied. The aim of this scoping review was to generate an overview of outcomes used in previous research regarding early mobilisation in critically ill children.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explored the potential of supervised machine learning applied to ECG data for real-time sleep monitoring in pediatric intensive care, which is currently not available.
  • Researchers analyzed polysomnography recordings from 90 non-critically ill children, developing various machine learning models to classify sleep states based on derived features from the ECG data.
  • Results showed that the models achieved moderate to good accuracy, especially in classifying two and three sleep states, with the XGBoost model performing best overall, highlighting the method's promise for bedside use.
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Intravenous maintenance fluid therapy (IV-MFT) is one of the most prescribed, yet one of the least studied, interventions in paediatric acute and critical care settings. IV-MFT is not typically treated in the same way as drugs with specific indications, contraindications, compositions, and associated adverse effects. In the last decade, societies in both paediatric and adult medicine have issued evidence-based practice guidelines for the use of intravenous fluids in clinical practice.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to create a straightforward index for sleep classification using electroencephalography data to address sleep disruption in pediatric intensive care units where real-time monitoring is unavailable.! -
  • A retrospective analysis was performed at Erasmus MC Sophia Children's Hospital on polysomnography recordings from non-critically ill children between 2017 and 2021, evaluating sleep patterns across various age groups and frequency bands.! -
  • The results indicated a strong performance of the developed sleep index, particularly with a gamma to delta power ratio, achieving balanced accuracy rates of up to 0.92 for two-state classifications in different age categories, suggesting it could facilitate automated sleep monitoring for children aged 6 months to 18 years.!
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Objectives: Predicting the patients' tolerance to enteral nutrition (EN) would help clinicians optimize individual nutritional intake. This study investigated the course of several gastrointestinal (GI) biomarkers and their association with EN advancement (ENA) longitudinally during pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) admission.

Methods: This is a secondary analysis of the Early versus Late Parenteral Nutrition in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit randomized controlled trial.

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Background & Aims: Critically ill children are fed day and night, assuming this improves enteral tolerance and the probability of achieving nutritional goals. It was previously shown that a fasting response, reflected by increased ketosis, at least partly explained the beneficial outcome of delayed initiation of supplemental parenteral nutrition. This study aims to investigate whether an overnight fast increases ketosis and is feasible and safe in critically ill children.

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Purpose: Intravenous maintenance fluid therapy (IV-MFT) prescribing in acute and critically ill children is very variable among pediatric health care professionals. In order to provide up to date IV-MFT guidelines, the European Society of Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC) undertook a systematic review to answer the following five main questions about IV-MFT: (i) the indications for use (ii) the role of isotonic fluid (iii) the role of balanced solutions (iv) IV fluid composition (calcium, magnesium, potassium, glucose and micronutrients) and v) and the optimal amount of fluid.

Methods: A multidisciplinary expert group within ESPNIC conducted this systematic review using the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) grading method.

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Background: Early mobilisation of critically ill adults has been proven effective and is safe and feasible for critically ill children. However, barriers and perceived benefits of paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) staff involvement in mobilising critically ill children are largely unknown.

Aim: To explore the barriers and perceived benefits regarding early mobilisation of critically ill children as perceived by PICU staff.

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Background: Intermittent fasting is a time-restricted feeding strategy with proven health benefits, which is based on multiple metabolic and endocrine changes, in several patient populations and healthy participants. In the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), artificial feeding is usually administered 24 hours a day, although solid evidence supporting this practice is lacking. This discards the potential benefits of fasting in this population.

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Although evidence for the superiority of continuous feeding over intermittent feeding is lacking, in most paediatric intensive care units (PICU) artificial feeding is administered continuously for 24 h per day. Until now, studies in PICU on intermittent feeding have primarily focused on surrogate endpoints such as nutritional intake and gastro-intestinal complaints and none have studied the effects of an extended fasting period. Intermittent fasting has been proven to have many health benefits in both animal and human studies.

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Background And Aims: Following the results of the paediatric early versus late parenteral nutrition in critical illness (PEPaNIC) multicentre, randomised, controlled trial, the new ESPGHAN/ESPEN/ESPR/CSPEN and ESPNIC guidelines recommend to consider withholding parenteral macronutrients for 1 week, while providing micronutrients, in critically ill children if enteral nutrition is insufficient. Critically ill children are suspected to be vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies due to inadequate enteral nutrition, increased body's demands and excessive losses. Hitherto, micronutrient requirements in PICU are estimated based on recommended daily intakes for healthy children and expert opinion.

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Objectives: To explore enteral feeding practices and the achievement of energy targets in children on noninvasive respiratory support, in four European PICUs.

Design: A four-center retrospective cohort study.

Setting: Four PICUs: Bristol, United Kingdom; Lyon, France; Madrid, Spain; and Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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Objectives: To explore the perceived barriers by pediatric intensive care healthcare professionals (nurses, dieticians, and physicians) in delivering enteral nutrition to critically ill children across the world.

Design: Cross-sectional international online survey adapted for use in pediatric settings.

Setting: PICUs across the world.

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Background: Nutritional support is considered essential for the outcome of paediatric critical illness. There is a lack of methodologically sound trials to provide evidence-based guidelines leading to diverse practices in PICUs worldwide. Acknowledging these limitations, we aimed to summarize the available literature and provide practical guidance for the paediatric critical care clinicians around important clinical questions many of which are not covered by previous guidelines.

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Background: Initiating parenteral nutrition (PN) within 24 h in critically ill children is inferior to withholding PN during the first week, as was found in the PEPaNIC study. The aims of this study were to investigate de-implementation of early initiation of PN at PICUs worldwide, and to identify factors influencing de-implementation.

Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted (May - October 2017), consisting of 41 questions addressing current PN practices, the degree of de-implementation, and factors affecting de-implementation.

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Importance: Undernourishment has been associated with poor outcomes of critical illness in children. The effects of withholding parenteral nutrition (PN) for 1 week in undernourished critically ill children are unknown.

Objective: To assess the outcome effects of withholding PN for 1 week in undernourished critically ill children.

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Purpose Of Review: The metabolic stress response of a critically ill child evolves over time and thus it seems reasonable that nutritional requirements change during their course of illness as well. This review proposes strategies and considerations for nutritional support during the recovery phase to gain optimal (catch-up) growth with preservation of lean body mass.

Recent Findings: Critical illness impairs nutritional status, muscle mass and function, and neurocognition, but early and high intakes of artificial nutrition during the acute phase cannot resolve this.

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The present study aimed to identify plasticizers present in indwelling plastic medical devices commonly used in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). We have analyzed a wide range of medical devices (n = 97) daily used in the PICUs of two academic hospitals in Belgium and the Netherlands. Identified compounds varied between the samples.

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Background: Previous randomised studies showed that withholding parenteral nutrition for 1 week of critical illness was superior to early initiation (<24-48 h) of parenteral nutrition in children and adults. However, neonates are considered more susceptible to macronutrient deficits. We investigated the effect of withholding parenteral nutrition for 1 week in critically ill, term neonates.

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Background: The multicentre randomised controlled PEPaNIC trial showed that withholding parenteral nutrition (PN) during the first week of critical illness in children was clinically superior to providing early PN. This study describes the cost-effectiveness of this new nutritional strategy.

Methods: Direct medical costs were calculated with use of a micro-costing approach.

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Objectives: Overfeeding during critical illness is associated with adverse effects such as metabolic disturbances and increased risk of infection. Because of the lack of sound studies with clinical endpoints, overfeeding is arbitrarily defined as the ratio caloric intake/measured resting energy expenditure (mREE) or alternatively as a comparison of measured respiratory quotient (RQ) to the predicted RQ based on the macronutrient intake (RQmacr). We aimed to compare definitions of overfeeding in critically ill mechanically ventilated children based on mREE, RQ, and caloric intake to find an appropriate definition.

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Purpose Of Review: Nutrition impacts outcome in critically ill children. Based on evolving neuro-endocrine, immunologic and metabolic alterations, three different phases can be proposed during the course of illness. The different phases each demand for tailored macronutrient intakes in critically ill children.

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