Loading...
Critically ill patients who cannot tolerate oral nutrition often have better outcomes after placement of nasogastric tubes that allow enteric feeding. These tubes commonly are placed with fluoroscopic guidance to assure proper positioning, but moving a critically ill patient to the radiology suite for this procedure is challenging. With the development of ultrathin endoscopes and transnasal endoscopy, could endoscopic placement of such tubes be accomplished more conveniently?
To address this question, investigators in Utah randomized 100 consecutive critically ill patients to have nasoenteric feeding tubes placed either by standard fluoroscopy or with an ultrathin endoscope at the bedside. The endoscopic group received standard endoscopy thr…