THE NEED FOR AGGRESSIVE NUTRITIONAL INTERVENTION IN THE INJURED PATIENT - THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PREDICTIVE MODEL

Early nutritional intervention has been advocated in trauma patients, We have developed a model to identify those patients who will most ben efit from the invasive and costly measures that are required to provid e injured patients with early enteral feedings, Four hundred forty-two patients admitted to a level I trauma center during a 2-month period were evaluated using 21 clinical variables, Time to tolerance of a reg ular diet was used as the dependent variable in a step-wise regression , and then the selected variables were used to build a classification and regression tree to predict tolerance of a regular diet within 5 da ys, Our findings demonstrate that intensive care unit disposition, Inj ury Severity Score, Abdominal Trauma Index, and the need for early sur gical intervention are important predictors regarding the need for ear ly nutritional intervention, When the model was applied to the study p opulation, it had a sensitivity of 83%, a specificity of 84%, and an a ccuracy of 84%.