Predicting Need for Enteral Tube Feeding After Ischemic Stroke: There's an App for That

A better method for predicting swallowing recovery would allow clinicians to optimize decisions about placing enteral feeding tubes in ischemic stroke patients with dysphagia. Better prediction would identify requirement for nasogastric tube (NGT) versus percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) feeding and could avoid unnecessary procedural risks, patient discomfort, or adverse impacts on delirium risk, especially when restraints are required. Wide variations in current clinical practice suggest decisions are largely guided by guesswork or intuition, highlighting the need for clinical evidence to inform clinical practice.

Galovic and colleagues developed a scoring system to predict persistent impairment of oral intake at 7 days (indication …