Critical care clinics
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Critical care clinics · Oct 1996
ReviewThe new pulmonary arterial catheters. Right ventricular ejection fraction and continuous cardiac output.
The flow-directed pulmonary artery catheter is the mainstay of hemodynamic monitoring in critically ill and injured patients. During its 25-year history, the catheter has been modified to measure mixed venous oxygen saturation, right ventricular ejection fraction, and recently, continual thermodilution cardiac output. The clinical application of the new generations of pulmonary artery catheters is reviewed in this article.
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Pulmonary capillary pressure (Pcap) is the true edema-forming pressure within the pulmonary vascular bed. Pulmonary artery occlusion pressure has long been used to approximate Pcap. These two pressures may not always be well correlated, which has significant implications for fluid resuscitation and the evolution of pulmonary edema. This article reviews the technique for bedside measurement of Pcap.
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Critical care clinics · Oct 1996
Historical ArticleThe Swan-Ganz catheter. Twenty-five years of monitoring.
The years that have passed since the introduction of the pulmonary artery catheter have been marked by radical changes in the practice of general and critical care medicine. There has been an increase in the application of physiologic principles to the management of shock states, myocardial infarction, and respiratory failure. These developments have caused an increase in the expectations of patients and physicians alike and in the general preparedness to offer critical care to extremely aged or infirmed patients.
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Critical care clinics · Jul 1996
ReviewICU scoring systems allow prediction of patient outcomes and comparison of ICU performance.
Too much time and effort are wasted in attempts to pass final judgment on whether systems for ICU prognostication are "good or bad" and whether they "do or do not" provide a simple answer to the complex and often unpredictable question of individual mortality in the ICU. A substantial amount of data supports the usefulness of general ICU prognostic systems in comparing ICU performance with respect to a wide variety of endpoints, including ICU and hospital mortality, duration of stay, and efficiency of resource use. Work in progress is analyzing both general resource use and specific therapeutic interventions. ⋯ These systems do not dehumanize our decision-making process but, rather, help eliminate physician reliance on emotional, heuristic, poorly calibrated, or overly pessimistic subjective estimates. No decision regarding patient care can be considered best if the facts upon which it is based on imprecise or biased. Future research will improve the accuracy of individual patient predictions but, even with the highest degree of precision, such predictions are useful only in support of, and not as a substitute for, good clinical judgment.
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Critical care clinics · Jul 1996
ReviewDoes increasing oxygen delivery improve outcome in the critically ill? No.
The strategy of treating critically ill patients by increasing oxygen delivery and consumption to values previously observed among survivors of critical illness (supranormal values) is based on the belief that (1) tissue hypoxia may persist in critically ill patients despite aggressive early resuscitation to traditional endpoints of adequate tissue perfusion and (2) that increasing oxygen delivery can reverse tissue hypoxia. This article addresses the question of whether increasing oxygen delivery improves outcomes in critically ill patients by reviewing the relationship between whole-body oxygen delivery and consumption and by critically examining the randomized controlled trials that have increased oxygen delivery to supranormal values.