Introduction: Patient-ventilator desynchronization can develop during weaning from proportional-assist ventilation. Poor adaptation between ventilator assistance and the patient's ventilatory demand is termed asynchrony.
Objectives: Comparative analysis of types and incidence of asynchrony in patients receiving pressure support (PS) ventilation or amplified spontaneous pattern (ASP) ventilation, to determine whether the presence of asynchrony is related to a patient's level of dyspnea or anxiety.
Patients and methods: Eighteen patients were studied prospectively after undergoing coronary revascularization. Baseline anxiety was assessed before surgery. A pleural catheter was inserted during surgery. After surgery patients were randomly assigned to ventilation with PS mode or ASP. Flow curves, flow volume, airway pressure and pleural pressure were recorded by a BioCore CP100 monitor once the patient's work of breathing held steady between 0.3 and 0.5 J/l. The curves were recorded for 10 m on a computer for later analysis. After each recording dyspnea and anxiety were assessed. Fifty consecutive cycles per patient were analyzed, signalling in each case the start of inspiration and expiration.
Results: Nine hundred ventilatory cycles were analyzed to identify five types of patient-ventilator asynchrony: 1) self-cycled (SC: inspiratory assistance from the ventilator without demand by patient); 2) no effort detected (NED: patient inspiratory effort but no flow response from the ventilator); 3) interrupted support (IS: interruption of ventilatory support during patient inspiration); 4) prolonged mechanical inspiration (PMI: maintenance of ventilatory support during patient expiration), and 5) double-breath, single cycle (DBSC: sequence of inspiration-expiration-inspiration of the patient within a single assisted inspiration). Asynchronic cycles were found in all PS-ventilated patients (84 of 450; 18.7%): 9.1% SC, 4% NED, 2.2% IS, 1.5% PMI and 1.8% DBSC. Asynchronic cycles were seen in only two ASP patients (16 of 450; 3.5%); both cases were NED asynchrony. Levels of anxiety and dyspnea were slightly higher with the PS mode than with ASP but the differences were not significant (p = 0.05).
Conclusions: The incidence of asynchrony during assisted ventilation is very high with the PS mode and is substantially less with ASP. Asynchrony is difficult to detect clinically and is revealed only by advanced cycle-to-cycle monitoring.