Thromboelastography-guided therapy improves patient blood management and certain clinical outcomes in elective cardiac and liver surgery and emergency resuscitation: A systematic review and analysis

Essentials TEG-guided therapy has been shown to be valuable in a number of surgical settings. This systematic review and analysis specifically evaluated the effects of TEG-guided therapy. TEG-guided therapy can improve blood product utilization and enhance resource management. Use of TEG improved key patient outcomes, including bleed rate, length of stay and mortality.

Background: Thromboelastography (TEG 5000 and 6s Thrombelastograph Hemostasis Analyzer; Haemonetics) is a point-of-care system designed to monitor and analyze the entire coagulation process in real time. TEG-guided therapy has been shown to be valuable in a variety of surgical settings.

Objective: To conduct an analysis of published clinical trials to evaluate the effects of TEG-guided transfusion for the management of perioperative bleeding on patient outcomes.

Patients/methods: We searched MEDLINE (PubMed) and EMBASE for original articles reporting studies using TEG vs controls in a perioperative setting for inclusion in this systematic review. We identified nine eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in two elective surgery settings (cardiac surgery and liver surgery), but only one RCT in the emergency setting.

Results: In the elective surgery study meta-analysis, platelet (P = 0.004), plasma (P < 0.001) and red blood cell transfusion (P = 0.14), operating room length of stay (LoS) (P = 0.005), intensive care unit LoS (P = 0.04) and bleeding rate (P = 0.002) were reduced with TEG-guided transfusion vs controls. Although blood product use was reduced, rates of mortality remained comparable between the TEG group and control group. In the emergency setting evaluation, the RCT reported lower mortality in the TEG group than in the control group (P = 0.049). In addition, there were significant reductions in platelet and plasma transfusion (P = 0.04 and P = 0.02, respectively), and the number of ventilator-free days increased, in the TEG group as compared with the control group (P = 0.10).

Conclusions: This systematic review and analysis indicate that TEG-guided hemostatic therapy can enhance blood product management and improve key patient outcomes, including LoS, bleeding rate, and mortality.