Critical care medicine
-
Critical care medicine · Mar 2016
The Preschool Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU: Valid and Reliable Delirium Monitoring for Critically Ill Infants and Children.
Delirium assessments in critically ill infants and young children pose unique challenges due to evolution of cognitive and language skills. The objectives of this study were to determine the validity and reliability of a fundamentally objective and developmentally appropriate delirium assessment tool for critically ill infants and preschool-aged children and to determine delirium prevalence. ⋯ The PreSchool Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU is a highly valid and reliable delirium instrument for critically ill infants and preschool-aged children, in whom delirium is extremely prevalent.
-
Critical care medicine · Mar 2016
ReviewA Framework for the Development and Interpretation of Different Sepsis Definitions and Clinical Criteria.
Although sepsis was described more than 2,000 years ago, and clinicians still struggle to define it, there is no "gold standard," and multiple competing approaches and terms exist. Challenges include the ever-changing knowledge base that informs our understanding of sepsis, competing views on which aspects of any potential definition are most important, and the tendency of most potential criteria to be distributed in at-risk populations in such a way as to hinder separation into discrete sets of patients. ⋯ The relative importance of these domains of usefulness depends on the intended purpose, of which there are four broad categories: 1) clinical care, 2) research, 3) surveillance, and 4) quality improvement and audit. This proposed methodologic framework is intended to aid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, provide a mechanism for explaining differences in epidemiologic estimates generated by different approaches, and guide the development of future definitions and diagnostic criteria.
-
Critical care medicine · Mar 2016
Application of a Framework to Assess the Usefulness of Alternative Sepsis Criteria.
The current definition of sepsis is life-threatening, acute organ dysfunction secondary to a dysregulated host response to infection. Criteria to operationalize this definition can be judged by six domains of usefulness (reliability, content, construct and criterion validity, measurement burden, and timeliness). The relative importance of these six domains depends on the intended purpose for the criteria (clinical care, basic and clinical research, surveillance, or quality improvement [QI] and audit). ⋯ Predictably, clinical care criteria, which emphasized timeliness and low burden and therefore used vital signs and routine laboratory tests, had the greater case identification with lowest mortality. QI/audit criteria, which emphasized reliability and criterion validity, used discharge information and had the lowest case identification with highest mortality. Using this framework to identify the purpose and apply domains of usefulness can help with the evaluation of existing sepsis diagnostic criteria and provide a roadmap for future work.