Permissive Underfeeding or Standard Enteral Feeding in Critical Illness

Abstract

To the Editor: Arabi et al. (June 18 issue)(1) report, in the Permissive Underfeeding versus Target Enteral Feeding in Adult Critically Ill Patients study, that they aimed to deliver enteral nutrition with the use of rate-based feeding in the standard-feeding group to achieve 70 to 100% of the calculated caloric requirement. Rate-based delivery of enteral nutrition sets a fixed rate without consideration of calories lost from interruptions in enteral nutrition, and incomplete delivery is largely attributable to these interruptions.(2) An unintended consequence is that the prescribed caloric target is not achieved, particularly in standard-feeding groups.(1),(3) In this study, the . . .