A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Effect of Beta-Blockers in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Systematically review the medical literature for the impact of beta-blockers on mortality and functional capacity in patients who suffered severe traumatic brain injury.

The search included MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Ovid Evidence-Based Medicine, clinical trial registries, and bibliographies.

All articles that reported outcome in TBI patients treated with beta-blockers.

Publication year, number of patients, outcome and follow-up. We performed a meta-analysis for each variable for which there were sufficient data to estimate mean differences.

12 studies were included, which involved retrospectively and prospectively collected data on 14,057 patients. The treatment with beta-blockers was associated with a reduction in mortality in patients who were treated with beta-blockers compared to the control group (OR 0.40, 95% CI 0.30-0.54p = <0.00001), with acceptable heterogeneity between studies (I2 = 65% p = 0.00008). Beta-blocker therapy decreases the risk of negative neurological and functional outcomes (OR 0.59, 95% CI 0.38-0.92 p = <0.00001), a very high statistical heterogeneity between the included studies (I2 = 80% p = 0.00004), being able to influence the results. An increase in favorable neurological and functional outcomes is shown (OR 1.19, 95% CI 1.07-1.31 p = 0.001) with acceptable heterogeneity (I2 = 52% p = 0.08).

The beta-blockers therapy is associated with significantly improves outcome in patients with TBI. Treatment with beta-blockers in patients with TBI is a promising frontier in neurotrauma.

CI: confidence interval; BB: Beta-Blockers; OR = odds ratio; TBI: Traumatic Brain Injury SD: Standard deviation; SNS: Sympathetic nervous system.