The Significance of Intracranial Pressure Monitoring for Reducing Mortality in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

BACKGROUND: Despite guidelines provided by the Brain Trauma Foundation (BTF) for treating patients with TBI, including advice to monitor intracranial pressure (ICP), the clinical application of ICP monitoring is far from universal. This laxity has been attributed to the relationship between mortality in TBI patients and ICP monitoring. OBJECTIVE: This systematic review and meta-analysis was aimed at determining the effect of intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring on the mortality of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). METHOD: A systematic search for articles was conducted on PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Central Register of Control Trials (CENTRAL), and APA PsycNet for articles published from 1 January 2000 to 1 August 2022. Manager 5.4 was used to carry out statistical analysis. RESULTS: Article search yielded 1421 articles, but only 23 cohort studies were included in the systematic review and meta-analysis. The total number of study participants is 80,058. Seventeen studies reported unadjusted odds ratios (OR), and only 8 reported the adjusted odds ratio (OR). Nine out of seventeen studies reported an unadjusted OR of less than 1, and five out of eight studies reported an adjusted OR of less than 1. From this paper's analysis, the OR for in-hospital mortality was 1.01 [95% CI, 0.80, 1.28], with a p value of 0.92. OR for ICU mortality was 0.84 [95% CI, 0.52, 1.35], with a p value of 0.47. CONCLUSION: But due to conflicting results, as evident above, it is unsatisfyingly challenging to draw any substantial conclusions from them. This paper thus calls for more research on this particular paper.