The benefits and pitfalls of implementing selective decontamination of the digestive tract in the intensive care unit: population and individual-level analyses.

Among 3806 patients who were intubated, 485 received selective digestive decontamination.

In population-level analyses, incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia dropped from 22.3 per 1000 ventilator-days prior to selective digestive decontamination implementation to 16.6 per 1000 ventilator-days after selective digestive decontamination implementation (incidence rate ratio 0.31; 95% confidence interval [95CI] 0.12-0.81).