Efficacy and safety of treatment with terlipressin infusion vs. bolus in gastrointestinal bleeding of variceal origin in a third-level hospital

Digestive bleeding of variceal origin represents an event with high mortality and pharmacological treatment is the mainstay in its management. In our setting, bolus terlipressin is the available treatment, although with frequent adverse effects, so we compared the efficacy and safety of bolus terlipressin vs. infusion for variceal bleeding. Experimental, randomized and comparative study in which adult patients from the Hospital de Especialidades Puebla were included from March 1, 2021, to October 31, 2021, with portal hypertension who presented with upper gastrointestinal bleeding of variceal origin and were administered terlipressin in infusion and in boluses. The protocol was approved by the local ethics committee and all patients participated with informed consent. Statistical analysis was performed in the IBM SPSS v. 28. 14 patients were randomly admitted, 7 to the infusion group and 7 to the bolus group. There were significant differences in the variables (Table 1) of days of hospital stay (p=0.023), adverse effects (p=0.018) and drug requirement (p=0.001); in the rest of the variables, there were no significant differences. Table 1. Given the size of our sample and study design, larger studies with better statistical power are needed to corroborate our results. The resources used in this study were from the hospital without any additional financing The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.