Feasibility and Acceptability of Implementing Indirect Calorimetry Into Routine Clinical Care of Patients With Spinal Cord Injury

A new paper tested how acceptable can be among spinal cord injury patients to undertake an indirect calorimetry test with canopy hood.

In the absence of reliable predictive equations, indirect calorimetry (IC) remains the gold standard for assessing energy requirements after spinal cord injury (SCI), but it is typically confined to a research setting. The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility and acceptability of implementing IC (bedside canopy hood) into routine clinical care in an Australian SCI rehabilitation facility.

Of 35 eligible patients, 9 declined (7 reported claustrophobia). One patient could not be tested before discharge and 25 underwent IC (84% male, injury level C2-L2, AIS A-D). Anxiety prevented one patient from completing IC, while another failed to fast. The remaining 23 patients achieved a steady-state REE (≥5 consecutive minutes with ≤10% coefficient of variation for VO2 and VCO2). Test-retest (n = 5) showed <10% variation in REE. Patients deemed the procedure acceptable, with 88% reporting a willingness to repeat IC. Eighty percent of patients and 90% of staff agreed it was acceptable for IC to be integrated into usual care.

This study found that "IC is a feasible and acceptable addition to the routine clinical care of patients recovering from SCI and may serve to improve accuracy of nutrition interventions for this patient population".

The article details are the following:

- Title: "Feasibility and Acceptability of Implementing Indirect Calorimetry Into Routine Clinical Care of Patients With Spinal Cord Injury"
- Authors: Amy Nevin, Hannah Mayr, Sridhar Atresh, Irene Kemp, Joshua Simmons, Angela Vivanti, and Ingrid J. Hickman
- Published in: Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation, August 2016

The full study can be purchased at the following link: click here