Annals of Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism

Original Article

Evaluation of the Clinical Effect of Intravenous Glutamine on Intensive Care Unit Patients: Kwang Joon Kim, Hey Young Jang, Min Ku Kang; J Clin Nutr 2019;11(1):23-28. Published online June 30, 2019; DOI: https://doi.org/10.15747/jcn.2019.11.1.23

Abstract PDF ePub: Purpose:
To evaluate the clinical effect of intravenous glutamine administration on patients admitted to the intensive care unit in general hospitals.
Methods:
Patients with more than 7 days in an intensive care unit were evaluated. The experimental group was the patients who received intravenous glutamine administration for more than 3 days. The laboratory results, intensive care unit length of stay, hospital length of stay, 30 days mortality, and hospital mortality were evaluated with a comparative group.
Results:
The mean number of administration days of intravenous glutamine was 10.12±8.93 days, and the average daily dose was 0.33±0.10 g/kg/day. No adequate improvement in the laboratory results of glutamine-treated group was observed. The intensive care unit length of stay (21.16±15.83 vs. 16.48±11.06, P=0.007), hospital length of stay (35.94±30.75 vs. 27.34±19.09, P=0.010), 30 days mortality (20.0% vs. 10.0%, P=0.034), and hospital mortality (26.3% vs. 13.0%, P=0.001) were higher in the glutamine-treated group.
Conclusion:
The use of intravenous glutamine on intensive care unit patients did not improve the clinical effect. Further large-scale multi-center studies will be needed to assess the proper administration of intravenous glutamine on intensive care unit patients.

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