DOHA: A piece of research conducted by Heart Hospital of Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) is one of the most highly accessed research articles on the website of BMC Anesthesiology, an open access, peer-reviewed journal.
The research entitled ‘Association of Time in Blood Glucose Range with Outcomes Following Cardiac Surgery’ is in the top 25 percent of all research outputs scored by Altmetric, which measures the attention that a scholarly article has received from various sources.
The research, published on the website last January, recently won the Research Award at HMC’s annual Stars of Excellence Awards.
Dr Amr Salah Omar, Consultant, Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit, at Heart Hospital, and Head of the research team, said diabetic and non-diabetic patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) are often at risk of high blood glucose levels as a result of the tension they experience, increased levels of some hormones, infections associated with being in intensive care and those caused by exposure to an artificial heart device.
“A high level of blood glucose could delay discharge from the ICU, which means that patients could be exposed to bacterial infections or severe complications, such as renal failure and atrial fibrillation, and consequently, to increased length of stay in the ICU,” he added.
“Global trends show that it is important to have control over a patient’s blood sugar levels after an operation.
“At Heart Hospital, we developed a protocol, in collaboration with the American Diabetes Council in Texas, to better control patient blood glucose levels. We created a way to measure what we termed as ‘time in range’ (TIR) to assess post-operative glycemic control in cardiac patients by recording time and the blood glucose range.
“We divided the patient cohort into two groups — the first group’s blood sugar was under control for more than 80 percent of the total length of their stay in intensive care and the second group’s blood sugar was controlled less than 80 percent of their stay,” Dr Omar added.The Peninsula
