Critical care clinics
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Diagnostic errors remain relatively understudied and underappreciated. They are particularly concerning in the intensive care unit, where they are more likely to result in harm to patients. There is a lack of consensus on the definition of diagnostic error, and current methods to quantify diagnostic error have numerous limitations as noted in the sentinel report by the National Academy of Medicine. Although definitive definition and measurement remain elusive goals, increasing our understanding of diagnostic error is crucial if we are to make progress in reducing the incidence and harm caused by errors in diagnosis.
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Clinical reasoning is prone to errors in judgment. Error is comprised of 2 components-bias and noise; each has an equally important role in the promulgation of error. Biases or systematic errors in reasoning are the product of misconceptions of probability and statistics. ⋯ Familiarity with these mathematical concepts will likely enhance clinical reasoning. Noise is defined as inter or intraobserver variability in judgment that should be identical. Guidelines in medicine are a technique to reduce noise.
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Critical care clinics · Oct 2021
ReviewPharmacologic Treatments for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.
Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a heterogenous syndrome with many etiologies for which there are no definitive pharmacologic treatments, despite decades of research. We explore some adjunctive pharmacologic therapies, including neuromuscular blockade, corticosteroids, and inhaled pulmonary vasodilators. ⋯ We do discuss the potential role of steroids in acute respiratory distress syndrome with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 as a trigger. The standard of care, however, remains supportive care.
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Critical care clinics · Oct 2021
ReviewGenetics of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: Pathways to Precision.
Clinical risk factors alone fail to fully explain acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) risk or ARDS death, suggesting that individual risk factors contribute. The goals of genomic ARDS studies include better mechanistic understanding, identifying dysregulated pathways that may be amenable to pharmacologic targeting, using genomic causal inference techniques to find measurable traits with meaning, and deconvoluting ARDS heterogeneity by proving reproducible subpopulations that may share a unique biology. This article discusses the latest advances in ARDS genomics, provides historical perspective, and highlights some of the ways that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is accelerating genomic ARDS research.