Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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The relationship between multidrug resistance (MDR), inappropriate empiric therapy (IET), and mortality among patients with Acinetobacter baumannii (AB) remains unclear. We examined it using a large U.S. ⋯ In this large U.S. database, the prevalence of MDR-AB among patients with AB infection was > 80 %. Harboring MDR-AB increased the risk of receiving IET more than fivefold, and IET nearly doubled hospital mortality.
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In recent years there have been many developments in post-resuscitation care. We have investigated trends in patient characteristics and outcome following admission to UK critical care units following cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for the period 2004-2014. Our hypothesis is that there has been a reduction in risk-adjusted mortality during this period. ⋯ Risk-adjusted hospital mortality following admission to ICU after cardiac arrest has decreased significantly during the period 2004-2014. Over the same period the ICU length of stay and time to treatment withdrawal has increased significantly.
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The prediction of infection and its severity remains difficult in the critically ill. A novel, simple biomarker derived from five blood-cell derived parameters that characterize the innate immune response in routine blood samples, the intensive care infection score (ICIS), could be helpful in this respect. We therefore compared the predictive value of the ICIS with that of the white blood cell count (WBC), C-reactive protein (CRP) and procalcitonin (PCT) for infection and its severity in critically ill patients. ⋯ The data suggest that the ICIS is potentially useful for the prediction of infection and its severity in critically ill patients, non-inferiorly to CRP and PCT. In contrast to CRP and PCT, the ICIS can be determined routinely without extra blood sampling and lower costs, yielding results within 15 minutes.