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DEFREE Enteral Nutrition Calculator by ESPEN
Save time
Reduce duration of hospitalization
Avoid mistakes
This enteral nutrition calculator was created for three purposes:
- To help intensive care doctors save time in calculating enteral nutrition goals.
- To increase accuracy by decreasing amount of mistakes in calculations.
- To decrease hospitalization period of the patients.
To reach ICU calculator even faster, “Add to Home screen” from your smartphone Internet browser.
Why accurate patient enteral nutrition calculation is important?
Every intensive care patient with a stay longer than 48 hours is considered to be at risk for malnutrition.
These patients, unless absolute contraindications are present or they can eat, should receive nutritional therapy, preferably – enteral nutrition. During the first week of stay, hypocaloric nutrition, meeting 70% of caloric needs, is recommended. After that time, full isocaloric nutrition can be delivered. The early strategy changes when indirect calorimetry is used to estimate energy expenditure. In that case isocaloric nutrition should be targeted from the third day of stay.
The impact of adequate nutrition has been documented in multiple studies, showing that both hypocaloric and hypercaloric nutrition has a negative impact on patient outcomes.
Save time
Reduce duration of hospitalization
Avoid mistakes
FREE Enteral Nutrition Calculator by ESPEN
This enteral nutrition calculator was created for three purposes:
- To help intensive care doctors save time in calculating enteral nutrition goals.
- To increase accuracy by decreasing amount of mistakes in calculations.
- To decrease hospitalization period of the patients.
To reach ICU calculator even faster, “Add to Home screen” from your smartphone Internet browser.
Why accurate patient enteral nutrition calculation is important?
Every intensive care patient with a stay longer than 48 hours is considered to be at risk for malnutrition.
These patients, unless absolute contraindications are present or they can eat, should receive nutritional therapy, preferably – enteral nutrition. During the first week of stay, hypocaloric nutrition, meeting 70% of caloric needs, is recommended. After that time, full isocaloric nutrition can be delivered. The early strategy changes when indirect calorimetry is used to estimate energy expenditure. In that case isocaloric nutrition should be targeted from the third day of stay.
The impact of adequate nutrition has been documented in multiple studies, showing that both hypocaloric and hypercaloric nutrition has a negative impact on patient outcomes.
Underfeeding has been consistently shown to result in an increased risk of infectious complications, impairs wound healing, prolongs duration of mechanical ventilation and hospitalization. Overfeeding, likewise, can impair weaning from mechanical ventilation, cause hepatic dysfunction, azotemia and volume overload. The adherence to isocaloric nutrition has been shown to reduce mortality in ICU patients.
Despite this evidence, goals of nutrition are reached rarely and, in observational studies, patients have been shown to be routinely underfed, with energy and protein intake of approximately 60%, on average. This suggests that we, as intensive care community, can and have to improve on this subject. Read more about scientific sources.