Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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Review
Bench-to-bedside review: Apoptosis/programmed cell death triggered by traumatic brain injury.
Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a physiological form of cell death that is important for normal embryologic development and cell turnover in adult organisms. Cumulative evidence suggests that apoptosis can also be triggered in tissues without a high rate of cell turnover, including those within the central nervous system (CNS). ⋯ In the current review we summarize the growing evidence that apoptosis occurs after traumatic brain injury (TBI), from experimental models to humans. This includes the identification of apoptosis after TBI, initiators of apoptosis, key modulators of apoptosis such as the Bcl-2 family, key executioners of apoptosis such as the caspase family, final pathways of apoptosis, and potential therapeutic interventions for blocking neuronal apoptosis after TBI.
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Current protective lung ventilation strategies commonly involve hypercapnia. This approach has resulted in an increase in the clinical acceptability of elevated carbon dioxide tension, with hypoventilation and hypercapnia 'permitted' in order to avoid the deleterious effects of high lung stretch. ⋯ However, there are no clinical data evaluating the direct effects of hypercapnia per se in acute lung injury. This article reviews the current clinical status of permissive hypercapnia, discusses insights gained to date from basic scientific studies of hypercapnia and acidosis, identifies key unresolved concerns regarding hypercapnia, and considers the potential clinical implications for the management of patients with acute lung injury.
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Review
Bench-to-bedside review: Ethical challenges for those in directing roles in critical care units.
Though much attention in the medical literature has focused on the ethics of critical care, it seems to be disproportionately weighted toward clinical issues. On the presumption that the operational management of an intensive care unit (ICU) also requires ethical considerations, it would be useful to know what these are. ⋯ We found that in addition to issues of resource allocation, there exist many areas of ethical importance to clinician-managers in the ICU that have been described only superficially. We argue that a renewed focus on ICU ethics is merited to shed light on these other, non-clinical, issues.
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Review
Clinical review: Noninvasive ventilation in the clinical setting--experience from the past 10 years.
This brief review analyses the progress of noninvasive ventilation (NIV) over the last decade. NIV has gained the dignity of first line intervention for acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, assuring reduction of the intubation rate, rate of infection and mortality. ⋯ The infection rate reduction effect achieved by NIV application is crucial for immunocompromised patients for whom the endotracheal intubation represents a high risk. Improvements in skills acquired with experience over time progressively allowed successful treatment of more severe patients.