Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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Review
Incretins and the intensivist: what are they and what does an intensivist need to know about them?
Hyperglycaemia occurs frequently in the critically ill, even in those patients without a history of diabetes. The mechanisms underlying hyperglycaemia in this group are complex and incompletely defined. ⋯ Incretin-based therapies (that is, glucagon-like peptide- 1 agonists and dipeptidyl-peptidase-4 inhibitors) have recently been incorporated into standard algorithms for the management of hyperglycaemia in ambulant patients with type 2 diabetes and, inevitably, an increasing number of patients who were receiving these classes of drugs prior to their acute illness will present to ICUs. This paper summarises current knowledge of the incretin effect as well as the incretin-based therapies that are available for the management of type 2 diabetes, and provides suggestions for the potential relevance of these agents in the management of dysglycaemia in the critically ill, particularly to normalise elevated blood glucose levels.
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Sepsis is a severe and life-threatening systemic inflammatory response to infection that affects all populations and age groups. The pathophysiology of sepsis is associated with aberrant interaction between leukocytes and the vascular endothelium. As inflammation progresses, the adhesion molecules that mediate these interactions become shed from cell surfaces and accumulate in the blood as soluble isoforms that are being explored as potential prognostic disease biomarkers. ⋯ In conclusion, while predictive properties of soluble adhesion molecules have been researched intensively, their levels are still poorly predictive of sepsis outcome and mortality. We propose two novel directions for improving clinical utility of soluble adhesion molecules: the combined simultaneous analysis of levels of adhesion molecules and their sheddases; and taking age-related discrepancies into account. Further attention to these issues may provide better understanding of sepsis pathophysiology and increase the usefulness of soluble adhesion molecules as diagnostic and predictive biomarkers.
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The incidence of death among patients admitted for severe sepsis or septic shock is high. Adrenomedullin (ADM) plays a central role in initiating the hyperdynamic response during the early stages of sepsis. Pilot studies indicate an association of plasma ADM with the severity of the disease. In the present study we utilized a novel sandwich immunoassay of bioactive plasma ADM in patients hospitalized with sepsis in order to assess the clinical utility. ⋯ In patients admitted with sepsis, severe sepsis or septic shock plasma ADM is strongly associated with severity of disease, vasopressor requirement and 28-day mortality.
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Editorial Comment
Skeletal muscle mass and mortality - but what about functional outcome?
We have known for over a decade that critical illness survivors suffer from significant functional disability after hospital discharge. Muscle wasting is a major contributor to this disability, occurring early and rapidly during critical illness, with the subsequent weakness associated with delayed weaning and prolonged hospital stay. The scale of this long-term public health issue is concerning for two important reasons: increasing numbers of patients survive critical illness, and this is compounded by the lack of interventions to reduce skeletal muscle wasting to combat the functional disability. ⋯ Firstly, muscle mass on admission to the ICU is a predictor of mortality and this physiological biomarker should therefore strongly be considered as an outcome measure in interventional studies. Secondly, low admission muscle mass is associated with increased disability and, in the case of this study, associated with an increased frequency of discharge to nursing homes. Further investigation is required to demonstrate the relationship between muscle mass, functional ability and discharge location.