Weaning Success in Different Weaning Strategies in Early Neurological Rehabilitation Patients - a Matched-pair Analysis

To enable weaning from mechanical ventilation, two different strategies may be distinguished: continuous weaning and discontinuous weaning. There is a lack of evidence of the superiority of one of both strategies is currently weak among early neurological rehabilitation patients. To the best of our knowledge, only one study including stroke patients compared different weaning strategies and showed a significantly shorter duration of mechanical ventilation during continuous than during discontinuous weaning, which is in contrast to the results of the largest weaning study with patients on medical-surgical intensive care units. In addition, further inconsistent results were reported from studies with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients, which might be due to disease duration and/or duration of prior mechanical ventilation in the acute care hospital. This small number of studies with controversial results indicates that there is a considerable need for further research. The current study intended to compare the rehabilitation outcome of early neurological rehabilitation patients, weaned by different strategies (continuous vs. discontinuous) through a matched-pair analysis.