Unplanned extubation among critically ill adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Unplanned extubation has been widely recognized as a life-threatening adverse event in intensive care unit patients.

To systematically quantify the global prevalence of unplanned extubation among critically ill adults and reintubation rate after unplanned extubation.

Systematic review and meta-analysis. We identified original peer-reviewed studies through electronic searches of EMBASE, PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and CINAHL databases involving ventilated adult intensive care unit patients. Primary endpoints were prevalence of overall unplanned extubation rate rate, type of unplanned extubation (self-extubation or accidental extubation) and reintubation rate within 48 hours. Two reviewers independently selected studies and extracted data on the outcomes. Random effect meta-analysis of proportions was used to estimate the pooled prevalence rates.

Of 1613 retrieved citations, 38 studies from 18 countries published between 1990 and 2020 were included. The overall methodological quality was low (mean score on Newcastle-Ottawa scale, 2.6/5). The pooled prevalence of unplanned extubation was 6.69% (95% CI, 5.29%-8.24%; 34 studies involving 121,129 subjects) with an incidence density of 1.06 events per 100 ventilator-days (95% CI, 0.7-1.3; 16 studies involving 375,967 ventilation days). The majority of unplanned extubations (84.2%) were self-extubations (95% CI, 79.8%-88.3%; 23 studies involving 2274 unplanned extubations). In addition, 50.2% of subjects with unplanned extubations required reintubation within 48 hours (95% CI, 43.6%-56.9%; 10 studies involving 1564 unplanned extubations).

Despite significant heterogeneity between studies, these data showed that 6.7% of intubated adult subjects in the intensive care unit experience unplanned extubation, most of which are self-extubations. Further well-designed studies are required to better understand unplanned extubation among intubated intensive care unitpatient, using standardized methods of data collection and reporting.