Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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Early, accurate diagnosis is fundamental in the management of patients with ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). The aim of this qualitative review was to compare various criteria of diagnosing VAP in the intensive care unit (ICU) with a special emphasis on the value of clinical diagnosis, microbiological culture techniques, and biomarkers of host response. ⋯ An integrated approach should be followed in diagnosing and treating patients with VAP, including early antibiotic therapy and subsequent rectification according to clinical response and results of bacteriologic cultures.
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Comparative Study Controlled Clinical Trial
Pituitary-adrenal function in patients with acute subarachnoid haemorrhage: a prospective cohort study.
Subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) may damage the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal gland (HPA) axis and disturb cortisol metabolism. There are no available data that relates to the response of the HPA axis in the acute phase of SAH. We aimed to characterise the behavior of serum adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), total cortisol, stimulated total cortisol and free cortisol concentrations in acute aneurysmal SAH. ⋯ Calculation of serum free cortisol concentration was not helpful in identifying patients with potential hypocortisolism. SAH severity did not affect cortisol concentrations, possibly indicating relative pituitary-adrenal insufficiency in patients with more severe bleeding.
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Hemorrhagic shock is a leading cause of death in trauma patients worldwide. Bleeding control, maintenance of tissue oxygenation with fluid resuscitation, coagulation support, and maintenance of normothermia remain mainstays of therapy for patients with hemorrhagic shock. Although now widely practised as standard in the USA and Europe, shock resuscitation strategies involving blood replacement and fluid volume loading to regain tissue perfusion and oxygenation vary between trauma centers; the primary cause of this is the scarcity of published evidence and lack of randomized controlled clinical trials. ⋯ This review points out new therapeutic strategies, namely immunomodulation, cardiovascular maintenance, small volume resuscitation, and so on, that have been introduced in clinics or are in the process of being transferred from bench to bedside. Control of hemorrhage in the earliest phases of care, recognition and monitoring of individual risk factors, and therapeutic modulation of the inflammatory immune response will probably constitute the next generation of therapy in hemorrhagic shock. Further randomized controlled multicenter clinical trials are needed that utilize standardized criteria for enrolling patients, but existing ethical requirements must be maintained.
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The Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines for the management of severe sepsis and septic shock recommend that the initial hemodynamic resuscitation be done according to the protocol used by Rivers and colleagues in their well-known early goal-directed therapy (EGDT) study. However, it may well be that their patients were much sicker on admission than many other septic patients. Compared with other populations of septic patients, the patients of Rivers and colleagues had a higher incidence of severe comorbidities, a more severe hemodynamic status on admission (excessively low central venous oxygen saturation [ScvO2], low central venous pressure [CVP], and high lactate), and higher mortality rates. ⋯ The EGDT protocol uses target values for CVP and ScvO2 to guide hemodynamic management. However, filling pressures do not reliably predict the response to fluid administration, while the ScvO2 of septic patients is characteristically high due to decreased oxygen extraction. For all these reasons, it seems that the hemodynamic component of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines cannot be applied to all septic patients, particularly those who develop sepsis during their hospital stay.
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Mortality in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) who require intubation or support with inotropes in an intensive care unit setting remains extremely high (up to 50%). Systematic use of objective severity-of-illness criteria, such as the Pneumonia Severity Index (PSI), British Thoracic Society CURB-65 (an acronym meaning Confusion, Urea, Respiratory rate, Blood pressure, age >/=65 years), or criteria developed by the Infectious Diseases Society of America/American Thoracic Society, to aid site-of-care decisions for pneumonia patients is emerging as a step forward in patient management. Experience with the Predisposition, Infection, Response, and Organ dysfunction (PIRO) score, which incorporates key signs and symptoms of sepsis and important CAP risk factors, may represent an improvement in staging severe CAP. In addition, it has been suggested that implementing a simple care bundle in the emergency department will improve management of CAP, using five evidence-based variables, with immediate pulse oxymetry and oxygen assessment as the cornerstone and initial step of treatment.