ECMO in Management of Patients With ARDS in The Intensive Care Unit, Systematic Review

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in comparison to conventional therapy in patients diagnosed with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Methods: I carried out a systematic review of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that were carried out after January 1st 2000, with the purpose of comparing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to conventional therapy in patients with severe ARDS. Results: I were able to locate two randomised controlled trials (CESAR and EOLIA), and I merged the data from 429 patients. On day 90, 77 of the 214 patients in the ECMO-group (36%) and 103 of the 215 patients in the control group (48%) had passed away. 36 (17%) of the control patients required emergency cardiopulmonary bypass (ECMO) (35 in EOLIA and 1 in CESAR). The treatment failure at 90 days was defined as death in the ECMO-group and either death or crossover to ECMO in the control group. Patients who were randomly assigned to get ECMO had a greater number of days in which they survived outside of the intensive care unit and were free of respiratory, cardiovascular, renal, and neurological failure. The only meaningful treatment-covariate interaction found in subgroups was a decreased death rate with ECMO in patients who had failure of two organs or less at the time of randomization. Conclusions: In patients with severely severe ARDS, neither the EOLIA study nor the CESAR study were able to successfully demonstrate that ECMO resulted in a significant improvement in the mortality rate after 60 days.