Articles: patients.
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Editorial Comment
Video laryngoscopy improves intubation success and reduces esophageal intubations compared with direct laryngoscopy in the medical intensive care unit.
Urgent and emergent airway management outside the operating room is fraught with complications due to the nature of its acuity, single or multiple system dysfunction or failure, and physiological disturbances. These provide a challenge to the airway team and place the patient at grave risk for potentially life-threatening airway and hemodynamics-related consequences. ⋯ Yet to assume that airway management difficulties can be erased by incorporating a new device is optimistic but naïve. In regard to patient safety, the device is just one piece of the airway puzzle.
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Editorial Comment
A protocol guided by transpulmonary thermodilution and lactate levels for resuscitation of patients with severe burns.
Over-resuscitation is deleterious in many critically ill conditions, including major burns. For more than 15 years, several strategies to reduce fluid administration in burns during the initial resuscitation phase have been proposed, but no single or simple parameter has shown superiority. ⋯ The authors' results confirm that resuscitation can be achieved with below-normal levels of preload but at the price of a fluid administration greater than predicted by the Parkland formula (2 to 4 mL/kg per% burn). The classic approach based on an adapted Parkland equation may still be the simplest until further studies identify the optimal bundle of resuscitation goals.
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A study by Burkle et al. in BMC Anesthesiology examined attitudes around perioperative do-not-resuscitate orders. Questionnaires were given to patients, as well as to anesthesiologists, internists and surgeons. The study has limitations and is open to interpretation. ⋯ However, this article could also encourage a broader debate. This is about how to respect patient autonomy, while ensuring that resuscitation truly serves the patient's best interests. This commentary outlines how more communication is needed at the bedside and in wider society.
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Diagnosis of sepsis is complicated by non-specific clinical definitions and delays in laboratory analysis using tests which may have very poor predictive values. The use of host biomarker signature sets, which when measured in combination have high predictive values, offers a paradigm shift forwards for rapid, near-patient diagnosis. These analyses more closely mirror the rapid blood chemistry and hematology analyses which often are used for near-patient testing and diagnosis.
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Although severe patient-ventilator asynchrony is frequent during invasive and non-invasive mechanical ventilation, diagnosing such asynchronies usually requires the presence at the bedside of an experienced clinician to assess the tracings displayed on the ventilator screen, thus explaining why evaluating patient-ventilator interaction remains a challenge in daily clinical practice. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Sinderby and colleagues present a new automated method to detect, quantify, and display patient-ventilator interaction. In this validation study, the automatic method is as efficient as experts in mechanical ventilation. This promising system could help clinicians extend their knowledge about patient-ventilator interaction and further improve assisted mechanical ventilation.