Delirium: The Next Vital Sign in the PICU?*

About Factors Associated With Delirium in Children: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Interest in research about pediatric delirium (PD) has increased over the past decade. The availability of validated instruments for the assessment of PD, such as the Cornell Assessment of PD, the Pediatric Confusion Assessment Method-ICU, and the Sophia Observation withdrawal Symptoms-PD scale, have enabled this field to grow (2). We agree with Huang et al ( 1) that clinicians and researchers involved in PD would benefit from all of the recently published systematic reviews and guidelines on this topic (2)(3)(4)(5).…”

“…e read with great interest the May 2023 systematic review and accompanying editorial about factors associated with delirium in critically ill children (1,2). The review authors quantitatively summarized the literature with a focus on factors likely to be associated with delirium during pediatric critical illness.…”

“…We thank Huang et al (1) for their questions about our publication in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (2).…”

“…The availability of validated instruments for the assessment of PD, such as the Cornell Assessment of PD, the Pediatric Confusion Assessment Method-ICU, and the Sophia Observation withdrawal Symptoms-PD scale, have enabled this field to grow (2). We agree with Huang et al ( 1) that clinicians and researchers involved in PD would benefit from all of the recently published systematic reviews and guidelines on this topic (2)(3)(4)(5). Although we did not register our systematic review, there is no duplication of the work with the other reviews, and they each had a different focus.…”

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“…In the meta-analysis these findings are reduced to seven factors associated with greater odds of developing delirium during pediatric critical illness (8). In the accompanying editorial our writers propose that it is time to include delirium screening as part of our “vital sign” monitoring (9).…”