Correct, we don’t have terlipressin in the US, yet… Hopefully, sometime in the not so far off future we’ll have the chance to play around with it. Essentially it’s a synthetic analog of vasopressin which we are more familiar with. There’s some written about its use in variceal bleeds and here is a cool little study from Egypt using it for refractory septic shock.

They enrolled 80 ICU patients that were in refractory septic shock; meaning that they had to meet sepsis criteria and have the following three criteria:

  1. SBP < 90mm Hg or MAP < 70
  2. Received at least 1000ml of IVF or CVP 8-12cmH2O
  3. Necessitated more than 0.5 mcg/kg/min of norepinephrine

The 80 adult patients were split into two, pretty well matched groups, of 40. One group received adrenaline (0.2ug/kg/min) as their second-line vasopressor and the other group received a continuous infusion of terlipressin (1.3ug/kg/hr). This study was interesting because it only lasted for the next 6 hours after the second vasopressor was started. Unfortunately, they really didn’t look at patient related outcomes, but instead their primary endpoints were:

  1. MAP > 65 mmHg
  2. Systemic vascular resistance index > 1300 dynes s/cm5/m2
  3. Cardiac index > 4 L/min/m2
  4. Oxygen delivery index (DO2I) > 550 ml/min/m2

From an Emergency Medicine point-of-view the MAP is probably what we are most familiar with and is an easy enough measure to monitor in the ED.  After initially starting with a statistically equivalent MAP before the start of the second vasopressor, to having a statistically significant difference (p<0.001) after the 6 hours is hard to ignore despite the lack of reported clinical outcomes. This was in addition to showing improved hemodynamic measures and decreased doses of norepinephrine needed in the terlipressin group. This by no means is the do-all and end-all for terlipressin, and doesn’t mean we start throwing it at everything with hypotension when it gets approved in the US. Might as well get familiar with it now though, so when it does show up there are no surprises.

Post by: Terrance McGovern DO, MPH (@drtmcg13)