Comparison of the effect of oral care with four different antiseptics to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia in adults: protocol for a network meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is defined as the occurrence of pneumonia in patients receiving mechanical ventilation for more than 48 h after endotracheal intubation. The implementation of effective oral care with antiseptics may reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia. However, previous studies have been unclear about the best antiseptic for this purpose. Therefore, present protocol proposed to perform a network meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy of different antiseptics to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia.

METHODS/DESIGN: We will search CNKI, WanFang database, PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, SinoMed from their inception to March 2016. There are no restrictions on language, publication year, or publication type. Only randomized clinical trials (RCTs) with antiseptics to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia will be considered. Study selection and data collection will be independently performed by two reviewers. Risk of bias assessments will be completed using the Cochrane risk of bias scale. The primary outcome is VAP morbidity. A network meta-analysis will be conducted to compare the effect of four different antiseptics on patient-relevant efficacy. Subgroup analyses will be performed by the type of setting and length of mechanical ventilation, and sensitivity analyses will be conducted to assess the robustness of the findings.

DISCUSSION: Oral care to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia has been widely used. The efficacy of usual oral antiseptics have been assessed mainly using traditional meta-analysis. However, it was unclear which oral care solution is best used for oral care and there were no head-to-head RCT to compare the efficacy of four antiseptics. The proposed network meta-analysis will compare four antiseptics and rank the results using network meta-analysis to decide which was the best.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42016038088.