Mortality Related to Intubation in Adult General ICUs: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Mortality related to intubation occurs as a result of multiple factors such as patient's condition, operator's skills, equipment use, intubation time, duration of laryngoscopy and intubation, and drugs and dosage used for endotracheal intubation (ETI).

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine mortality related to intubation and the overall intensive care unit (ICU) mortality rate in adult general ICUs.

We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis on randomized clinical trials and cohort and cross-sectional research from three electronic databases with hand searching. The studies reported mortality related to intubation and the overall ICU mortality rate in adult general ICUs. Our search resulted in 28 published articles without any restriction on date and language. The systematic review and meta-analysis was performed to examine mortality related to intubation and the overall ICU mortality rate.

We found 7,866 articles in the literature review from the three databases based on our keywords, of which 28 studies were eligible to include in the study. We observed that mortality related to intubation and the overall ICU mortality rate in intubated patients were 1% and 30%, respectively.

This was the first comprehensive systematic review on mortality related to intubation and the overall ICU mortality rate in adult general ICUs, which showed the current care of ETI. However, it was associated with increased complications, which may increase mortality.