[Articles] Physical restraint use in a United States intensive care unit—a retrospective cross sectional, single center cohort study from 2008 to 2022

Restraint practices appear to vary with patient acuity, institutional factors, and communication barriers. The sensitivity of ethnic disparities to psychiatric diagnosis adjustment suggests these diagnoses may function as mediators rather than confounders, potentially reflecting systematic differences in clinical assessment along the causal pathway between ethnicity and restraint decisions. The non-representativeness of matched cohorts underscores that disparities depend on which patient subgroups are compared.