Intensive care medicine
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To evaluate the risk and effectiveness of pericardiocentesis in primary and repeat cardiac tamponade. ⋯ Pericardiocentesis is the treatment of choice for primary symptomatic pericardial effusion. In recurrent pericardial effusion surgical approaches appear to be preferable.
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Intensive care medicine · May 2000
The added value that increasing levels of diagnostic information provide in prognostic models to estimate hospital mortality for adult intensive care patients.
To investigate in a systematic, reproducible way the potential of adding increasing levels of diagnostic information to prognostic models for estimating hospital mortality. ⋯ The UK APACHE II model can be simplified by extending the admission type and substituting the 53 UK APACHE II diagnostic categories with nine body systems, without losing discriminative power or calibration.
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To investigate the effect of steroid treatment in the late phase of primary acute lung injury (ALI) with special emphasis on pneumococcal pneumonia. ⋯ In patients with primary ALI, steroid therapy, started 10 days after the start of mechanical ventilation, improves gas exchange and is associated with a decrease in multiorgan dysfunction.