Noninvasive ventilation in trauma

Trauma patients are a diverse population with heterogeneous needs for ventilatory support. This requirement depends mainly on the severity of their ventilatory dysfunction, degree of deterioration in gaseous exchange, any associated injuries, and the individual feasibility of potentially using a noninvasive ventilation approach. Noninvasive ventilation may reduce the need to intubate patients with trauma-related hypoxemia. It is well-known that these patients are at increased risk to develop hypoxemic respiratory failure which may or may not be associated with hypercapnia. Hypoxemia in these patients is due to ventilation perfusion mismatching and right to left shunt because of lung contusion, atelectasis, an inability to clear secretions as well as pneumothorax and/or hemothorax, all of which are common in trauma patients. Noninvasive ventilation has been tried in these patients in order to avoid the complications related to endotracheal intubation, mainly ventilator-associated pneumonia. The potential usefulness of noninvasive ventilation in the ventilatory management of trauma patients, though reported in various studies, has not been sufficiently investigated on a large scale. According to the British Thoracic Society guidelines, the indications and efficacy of noninvasive ventilation treatment in respiratory distress induced by trauma have thus far been inconsistent and merely received a low grade recommendation. In this review paper, we analyse and compare the results of various studies in which noninvasive ventilation was applied and discuss the role and efficacy of this ventilator modality in trauma.