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What device settings (e.g. flow rate) are commonly used in nasal high flow research?


The initiation of NHF and settings used are the clinicians’ decision based on the individual patient.

A review of NHF-controlled studies using a systematic search of the PubMed database found that the flow rates ranged from 10 to 60 L/min and the majority of the studies required flow rates of ≥ 45 L/min. 

  • For a picture of the studies, see the image below - to understand more about this data was gathered, jump to our Flow Matters edition 11 here. 

 

Flow
 
 
Additionally, protocols based on published research are starting to emerge for some patient populations. One of the first of these was published in 2017 by Ischaki et al. and is specific to patients with acute hypoxemic respiratory failure (AHRF).

Others have been published by
  1. Ricard et al. 2019 (pre-oxygenation for intubation outside the operating room) 
  2. d’Espiney et al 2020 (hypercapnia) 
  3. Pantazopoulos et al. 2020 (COPD with Hypercapnic respiratory failure) 
  4. Raoof et al. 2020 (COVID-19)


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