Early postoperative enteral nutrition improves gut oxygenation and reduces costs compared with total parenteral nutrition

I nternational guidelines proposethe use of postoperative artificialnutrition in either undernour-ished patients or well-nourished subjects when the estimated period of postoperative semistarvation is longer than 10 days (1–3). In such patients, total parenteral nutrition (TPN) is commonly prescribed, although recent reviews sug-gest that the more physiologic enteral nutrition is feasible and safe after major surgery and trauma (4, 5). Nevertheless, at present, definitive data suggesting that in elective surgical patients early enteral nutrition (EEN) is superior to TPN on outcome variables are lacking. In fact, only a few small studies have been pub-lished on this specific topic (6, 7)