Nutrition in the Acute Phase of Critical Illness

The quality of randomized, controlled trials was considered to be high when the study had blinded study-group assignments, a sample size sufficiently large to detect the hypothesized treatment effect, a diagram showing how patients were selected, prespecified end points, and an intention-to-treat analysis. NA denotes not available because evidence is lacking from high-quality randomized, controlled trials. No diagram showing how patients were selected was included in the study by Montejo et al. 10 No information on the way in which investigators concealed study-group assignments was included in the study by Acosta-Escribano et al. 13 No sample-size calculation and only partial outcome data in the intention-to-treat population were included in the study by Pontes-Arruda et al., 22 and no diagram showing how patients were selected was included in the study by Umpierrez et al. 23 The study by Rice et al. 24