NCT06667297

Correlation Between Acute Gastrointestinal Injury and Venous Return in Critical Ill Patients

Completed Last updated 5 September 2025

What this trial tests

trial in Acute Gastrointestinal Injury in 200 participants. Completed in 30 July 2025.

Timeline

1 May 2023

Primary endpoint
30 November 2024

30 July 2025

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Peking Union Medical College Hospital
Status	Completed
Study type	OBSERVATIONAL
Enrollment	200
Start date	1 May 2023
Primary completion	30 November 2024
Estimated completion	30 July 2025
Sites	1 location across China

Conditions studied

• Acute Gastrointestinal Injury — all drugs for Acute Gastrointestinal Injury →
• Critical Illness — all drugs for Critical Illness →

Sponsor

Peking Union Medical College Hospital

Who can join

Adults 18 to 80, any sex, with Acute Gastrointestinal Injury or Critical Illness. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

Currently, altered intestinal blood flow in critically ill patients has been a hot research topic in recent years. In 2022, studies on acute mesenteric ischemia were published in top journals in critical care medicine \[Crit Care, 2022. 26(1): p.92. and Intensive Care Med, 2022. 26(2): p.92.\].

However, because the gastrointestinal tract is in the abdominal cavity and doctors lack methods to directly monitor the visceral perfusion. Therefore, there is little research on the relationship between gastrointestinal perfusion and acute gastrointestinal injury in critical ill patients. Currently, the diagnosis of acute gastrointestinal injury is mostly performed using subjective indicators and adverse outcomes that have already occurred, which results in the treatment of acute gastrointestinal injury often lagging behind.

The use of color Doppler ultrasonography to assess blood flow in intestinal vessels in healthy and outpatient patients has been in use since the 1980s. Our team showed that the resistance index of the superior mesenteric artery(SMA) in postoperative cardiac surgery patients correlated with lactate values and lactate clearance \[Front Med (Lausanne), 2021.8: p.762376.\], suggesting that gastrointestinal perfusion as reflected by SMA blood flow is important for systemic resuscitation, and that Doppler indices of SMA have the potential value of reflecting intestinal hypo-perfusion.

Intestinal venous blood enters the portal vein and then the liver before returning to the right heart via the inferior vena cava. Right ventricular dysfunction or abdominal hypertension could cause obstruction of portal venous return, which might lead to edema and dysfunction of the intestine.

Therefore, monitoring the venous return status is crucial for intestinal perfusion.

In 2012, the Venous Excess Ultrasound Score(VExUS) for evaluating venous return has been reported and it has been shown to correlate with acute kidney injury (AKI) \[Intensive Care Med, 2012. 38(3): p.384-94\]. However, there is currently no research on the correlation between acute gastrointestinal injury and venous return, and this study is innovative and exploratory.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.