Ep 98 - Does the Sequence of RSI Medications Matter

The EMS Lighthouse Project

The next time you go to intubate a patient, should you give the sedation before the paralytic or the paralytic before the sedative? Does it matter? And what the hell does Bayes have to do with any of this? Dr Jarvis reviews a paper that uses Bayesian statistics to calculate the association between drug sequence and first attempt failure. Then he returns to Nerd Valley to talk about how to interpret 95% confidence intervals derived from frequentists statistics compared to 95% credible intervals that come from Bayesian statistics.

Citations:

1. Catoire P, Driver B, Prekker ME, Freund Y: Effect of administration sequence of induction agents on first‐attempt failure during emergency intubation: A Bayesian analysis of a prospective cohort. Academic Emergency Medicine. 2025;February;32(2):123–9.

2. Casey JD, Janz DR, Russell DW, Vonderhaar DJ, Joffe AM, Dischert KM, Brown RM, Zouk AN, Gulati S, Heideman BE, et al.: Bag-Mask Ventilation during Tracheal Intubation of Critically Ill Adults. N Engl J Med. 2019;February 28;380(9):811–21.

3. Greer A, Hewitt M, Khazaneh PT, Ergan B, Burry L, Semler MW, Rochwerg B, Sharif S: Ketamine Versus Etomidate for Rapid Sequence Intubation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Trials. Critical Care Medicine. 2025;February;53(2):e374–83.