Association Between Polyethylene Glycol Dose and Length of Hospital Stay in Body Packing Patients: A Retrospective Review

Objectives: Body packing is one of the methods used to smuggle illicit drugs and items. Identifying the drug and eradicating drug packs are essential tasks to complete in the shortest possible time to reduce the risk of toxicity. Polyethylene glycol is one of the safer laxatives to use if surgical exploration is not indicated. The objective of this study is to evaluate the association of the dose of polyethylene glycol (PEG) and the length of hospital stay and/or time for body packers to evacuate drug packs. Methods: This is a retrospective analysis completed at Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar, studying adult patients who received polyethylene glycol to evacuate drug packs from January 2018 to September 2019. Results: The primary and secondary outcomes are association between PEG doses and length of hospital stay and time to drug pack clearance, respectively. There were a total of 39 patients included in this study. A minority of patients developed signs of systemic toxicity. The average hospital length of stay for all patients was 86.2 h. The results show that the PEG dose at 12 h is inversely proportional to the length of hospital stay where each extra 1 g will decrease length of hospital stay by 0.098 h. The results are even more statistically significant when analyzed compared to time to clearance with a regression coefficient of −0.136 (p = 0.022). Conclusions: This study shows that a higher polyethylene glycol dose, especially at 12 h, is safe and reduces the time needed to clear drug packs and reduces length of hospital stay.