Intensive care medicine
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Intensive care medicine · Jul 2022
How doctors manage conflicts with families of critically ill patients during conversations about end-of-life decisions in neonatal, pediatric, and adult intensive care.
Intensive care is a stressful environment in which team-family conflicts commonly occur. If managed poorly, conflicts can have negative effects on all parties involved. Previous studies mainly investigated these conflicts and their management in a retrospective way. This study aimed to prospectively explore team-family conflicts, including its main topics, complicating factors, doctors' conflict management strategies and the effect of these strategies. ⋯ This study underlines the importance of doctors tailoring their communication strategies to the concrete conflict topic(s) and to the context- and family-related factors which complicate a specific conflict.
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Intensive care medicine · Jul 2022
Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study(1 → 3)-β-D-Glucan-guided antifungal therapy in adults with sepsis: the CandiSep randomized clinical trial.
To investigate whether (1 → 3)-β-d-Glucan (BDG)-guidance shortens time to antifungal therapy and thereby reduces mortality of sepsis patients with high risk of invasive Candida infection (ICI). ⋯ Serum BDG guided antifungal treatment did not improve 28-day mortality among sepsis patients with risk factors for but unexpected low rate of IC. This study cannot comment on the potential benefit of BDG-guidance in a more selected at-risk population.
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Intensive care medicine · Jul 2022
Multicenter StudyPartition of respiratory mechanics in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome and association with outcome: a multicentre clinical study.
In acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), physiological parameters associated with outcome may help defining targets for mechanical ventilation. This study aimed to address whether transpulmonary pressures (PL), including transpulmonary driving pressure (DPL), elastance-derived plateau PL, and directly-measured end-expiratory PL, are better associated with 60-day outcome than airway driving pressure (DPaw). We also tested the combination of oxygenation and stretch index [PaO2/(FiO2*DPaw)]. ⋯ DPL was equivalent predictor of outcome than DPaw. Our study supports the soundness of limiting lung and airway driving pressure and maintaining positive end-expiratory PL in obese patients.