Acta anaesthesiologica Scandinavica
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There is a lack of studies showing the overall impact of multi-detector computed tomography (MDCT) on the treatment of critically ill patients in a general intensive care unit (ICU) setting. ⋯ Sixty-one percent of the MDCT examinations led to a change of treatment, and 24% of them otherwise contributed to or supported clinical decision-making, suggesting that MDCT examination is helpful in the case of general ICU patients, with inconclusive findings with other imaging modalities.
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Acta Anaesthesiol Scand · Apr 2008
Perioperative concentrations of catecholamines in the cerebrospinal fluid and plasma during spinal anesthesia.
Catecholamine release is a physiological response to stress. The extent to which perioperative stress provokes the central release of catecholamines, which modulate pain perception in the spinal cord, still remains unknown. The perioperative course of catecholamine concentrations in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma was examined. ⋯ During spinal anesthesia for elective hip joint replacement, norepinephrine concentrations were greater in plasma than in CSF. CSF dopamine and epinephrine concentrations were essentially undetectable. The changes in CSF-norepinephrine concentrations and the changes of plasma norepinephrine concentrations showed no association with each other; nor were there correlations between clinical stress parameters (HR, MAP) or visual analog scale pain, and the changes in CSF norepinephrine concentrations.
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Acta Anaesthesiol Scand · Apr 2008
Case ReportsIatrogenic systemic air embolism treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Air embolism is a rare and potentially severe complication of surgical and invasive procedures. Emboli large enough to produce symptoms require immediate treatment because of the risk of 'gas lock' in the right side of the heart and subsequent circulatory failure. ⋯ We present two cases with venous air emboli and concurrent cerebral arterial emboli. Both patients were successfully treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
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Patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) require huge resources because of the dysfunction of several of their vital organs. The heterogeneity and complexity of the ICU patient have generated interest in systems able to measure severity of illness as a method of predicting outcome, comparing quality-of-care and stratification for clinical trials. ⋯ Different forms of scoring systems are frequently used in the ICU. They have become a necessary tool to describe ICU populations and to explain differences in mortality. As there are several pitfalls related to the interpretation of the numbers supplied by the systems, they should not be used without knowledge on the science of severity scoring.
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Pre-operative fasting is assumed to cause a deficit in intravascular blood volume (BV), as a result of ongoing urine production and insensible perspiration. Standard regimes consist of volume loading prior or simultaneous to any anaesthetic procedure to minimise the risk of hypotension. However, fluid overload in the context of major abdominal surgery has been shown to deteriorate patient outcome. Our study aimed to quantify total intravascular BV after fasting by direct measurements and to compare it with calculated normal values in comparable non-fasted patients. ⋯ Our data suggest that even after prolonged pre-operative fasting, cardio-pulmonary healthy patients remain intravascularly normovolaemic. Therefore, hypotension associated with induction of general or neuraxial anaesthesia should perhaps be treated with moderate doses of vasopressors rather than with undifferentiated volume loading.