In the beginning, there was only what was called “controlled mechanical ventilation”, which was basically a set volume of air and amount of breaths that was delivered to the patient. This was great, but what if the patient wanted to breathe too? What happened is what we call patient-ventilator asynchrony. …show more content…
When patients are in sync with the ventilator, they are more likely to be comfortable and can achieve more rest. The idea that a mode of ventilation could be triggered by neuro-ventilatory coupling would be ideal to use for patient ventilator asynchrony. This is where NAVA can be beneficial to patients. In fact, NAVA constitutes a new way to initiate, proportionate, and terminate the mechanical support on a spontaneous breathing. Instead of using flow or pressure changes to synchronize the assistance, NAVA bypasses ventilator circuits and airways, guiding the support of each breath on the electrical activity of the diaphragm (EAdi) (Piastra, De Luca, Costa, Pizza, De Sanctis, Marzano, Biasucci, Visconti, Conti, …show more content…
There was a total of 16 patients enrolled in this study. These patients ranged in age from 9 months to 3 years old. The peak inspiratory pressure for the group, as they were in NAVA mode, was significantly lower than in PSV mode, with a 28% decrease after 30 minutes and a 32% decrease after 3 hours (Breatnach, Conlon, Stack, Healy, O’Hare, 2010). Researchers of this study came to a very similar conclusion. It states that ventilating patients in NAVA mode were associated with improved patient-ventilator synchrony and lower peak airway pressures when compared with PSV (Breatnach,