[Complications of enteral nutrition at home. Results of a multicentre trial].

AIM: In spite of the increasing number of home enteral nutrition (HEN) patients, only few articles had reported the frequency of complications related to this treatment. Our multicentric study analyzes the HEN complications in relation to access device and time of treatment.

METHOD: 92 HEN patients from 8 hospitals were randomly selected. Patients were distributed in relation to the time of treatment and access device (nasogastric tube and percutaneous or surgical gastrostomies). After an educational program, they were filled in an initial questionnaire and repeated it the days 15 and 30. They received a mean of 1650 Kcal of enteral solution. A total of 2760 HEN prospective days were analyzed.

RESULTS

In prospective study 42% of patients had some complication (112 episodes). The most frequent were gastrointestinal (55%) and mechanical (29%); 0.16 complications of patient-year were registered. The most common complications were: extraction (15%), constipation (13%), vomiting (12%) and diarrhoea (10%). The gastrostomy group had more gastrointestinal complications. In retrospective evaluation, percutaneous gastrostomy group had the lowest ratio of complications and nasogastric tube group required more tube replacements (4 vs 2) and had 1.96 episodes/patient (percutaneous group 1.85 and surgical gastrostomy 3.1 episodes/patient).

CONCLUSION

HEN is safe with low incidence of complications. An adequate educational program is very important and we expect, in the future, to establish an proper National Home Care System.