Loading...
Acid-suppressive medication helps to prevent stress-related gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding in critically ill patients, but the practice has spread to noncritical patients despite no good evidence of benefit. Various studies have shown that up to 70% of all inpatients receive acid-suppressive medication. Boston investigators sought to supplement the results of smaller randomized trials with a retrospective cohort study of about 79,000 adults admitted for diagnoses other than GI bleeding; about 46,000 (59%) of them received acid-suppressive medications.
The rate of nosocomial GI bleeding (i.e., bleeding occurring more than 24 hours after admission) was 0.29%. In adjusted analyses that compared patients treated and not treated with acid-suppres…