Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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This review documents important progress made in 2013 in the field of critical care respirology, in particular with regard to acute respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Twenty-five original articles published in the respirology and critical care sections of Critical Care are discussed in the following categories: pre-clinical studies, protective lung ventilation--how low can we go, non-invasive ventilation for respiratory failure, diagnosis and prognosis in acute respiratory distress syndrome and respiratory failure, and promising interventions for acute respiratory distress syndrome.
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Observational Study
Effect of a fever control protocol-based strategy on ventilator-associated pneumonia in severely brain-injured patients.
Fever is associated with a poor outcome in severely brain-injured patients, and its control is one of the therapies used in this condition. But, fever suppression may promote infection, and severely brain-injured patients are frequently exposed to infectious diseases, particularly ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). Therefore, we designed a study to explore the role of a fever control protocol in VAP development during neuro-intensive care. ⋯ Fever control in brain-injured patients was a major risk factor for VAP occurrence, particularly when applied for > 3 days.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Mechanism of action of tranexamic acid in bleeding trauma patients: an exploratory analysis of data from the CRASH-2 trial.
To investigate the mechanism of action of tranexamic acid (TXA) in bleeding trauma patients, we examined the timing of its effect on mortality. We hypothesised that if TXA reduces mortality by decreasing blood loss, its effect should be greatest on the day of the injury when bleeding is most profuse. However, if TXA reduces mortality via an anti-inflammatory mechanism its effect should be greater over the subsequent days. ⋯ Early administration of tranexamic acid appears to reduce mortality primarily by preventing exsanguination on the day of the injury.
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Accurate assessment of prognosis for patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS; formerly vegetative state) may help clinicians and families guide the type and intensity of therapy; however, there is no suitable and accurate means to predict the outcome so far. We aimed to develop a simple bedside scoring system to predict the likelihood of awareness recovery in patients with UWS. ⋯ This simple bedside prognostic score can be used to predict the probability of awareness recovery in UWS, thus provide families and clinicians with useful outcome information.
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Although aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is often complicated by myocardial injury, whether this neurogenic cardiomyopathy is associated with the modification of cardiac metabolism is unknown. This study sought to explore, by positron emission tomography/computed tomography, the presence of altered cardiac glucose metabolism after SAH. ⋯ These findings support the hypothesis of neurogenic myocardial stunning after SAH. In hemodynamically stable acute phase SAH patients, cardiomyopathy is characterized by diffuse and heterogeneous (18)F-FDG and (123)I-mIBG uptake defect.