American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine
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Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. · Dec 2010
ReviewThe design of future pediatric mechanical ventilation trials for acute lung injury.
Pediatric practitioners face unique challenges when attempting to translate or adapt adult-derived evidence regarding ventilation practices for acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome into pediatric practice. Fortunately or unfortunately, there appears to be selective adoption of adult practices for pediatric mechanical ventilation, many of which pose considerable challenges or uncertainty when translated to pediatrics. ⋯ These issues surround the lack of explicit ventilator protocols in pediatrics, either computer or paper based; differences in modes of conventional ventilation and perceived marked differences in the approach to high-frequency oscillatory ventilation; challenges with patient recruitment; the shortcomings of the definition of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome; the more reliable yet still somewhat unpredictable relationship between lung injury severity and outcome; and the reliance on potentially biased surrogate outcome measures, such as ventilator-free days, for all pediatric trials. The purpose of this review is to highlight these challenges, discuss pertinent work that has begun to address them, and propose potential solutions or future investigations that may help facilitate comprehensive trials on pediatric mechanical ventilation and define clinical practice standards.
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Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. · Dec 2010
ReviewStrategic plan for lung vascular research: An NHLBI-ORDR Workshop Report.
The Division of Lung Diseases of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, with the Office of Rare Diseases Research, held a workshop to identify priority areas and strategic goals to enhance and accelerate research that will result in improved understanding of the lung vasculature, translational research needs, and ultimately the care of patients with pulmonary vascular diseases. Multidisciplinary experts with diverse experience in laboratory, translational, and clinical studies identified seven priority areas and discussed limitations in our current knowledge, technologies, and approaches. The focus for future research efforts include the following: (1) better characterizing vascular genotype-phenotype relationships and incorporating systems biology approaches when appropriate; (2) advancing our understanding of pulmonary vascular metabolic regulatory signaling in health and disease; (3) expanding our knowledge of the biologic relationships between the lung circulation and circulating elements, systemic vascular function, and right heart function and disease; (4) improving translational research for identifying disease-modifying therapies for the pulmonary hypertensive diseases; (5) establishing an appropriate and effective platform for advancing translational findings into clinical studies testing; and (6) developing the specific technologies and tools that will be enabling for these goals, such as question-guided imaging techniques and lung vascular investigator training programs. Recommendations from this workshop will be used within the Lung Vascular Biology and Disease Extramural Research Program for planning and strategic implementation purposes.