Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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The present review is the first in an ongoing guide to medical statistics, using specific examples from intensive care. The first step in any analysis is to describe and summarize the data. ⋯ This review introduces some of these measures. It describes and gives examples of qualitative data (unordered and ordered) and quantitative data (discrete and continuous); how these types of data can be represented figuratively; the two important features of a quantitative dataset (location and variability); the measures of location (mean, median and mode); the measures of variability (range, interquartile range, standard deviation and variance); common distributions of clinical data; and simple transformations of positively skewed data.
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Rotating antibiotics in the intensive care unit may result in less infections caused by resistant organisms and in even less mortality. The selection of super-resistant organisms associated with the rotation strategy cannot be excluded, however, and many practical issues will have to be addressed before antibiotic rotation can be routinely recommended.
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Comparative Study
Effects of intravenous furosemide on mucociliary transport and rheological properties of patients under mechanical ventilation.
The use of intravenous (IV) furosemide is common practice in patients under mechanical ventilation (MV), but its effects on respiratory mucus are largely unknown. Furosemide can affect respiratory mucus either directly through inhibition of the NaK(Cl)2 co-transporter on the basolateral surface of airway epithelium or indirectly through increased diuresis and dehydration. We investigated the physical properties and transportability of respiratory mucus obtained from 26 patients under MV distributed in two groups, furosemide (n = 12) and control (n = 14). ⋯ In contrast, no significant changes were observed in the control group. The remaining parameters did not change significantly in either group. Our results support the hypothesis that IV furosemide might acutely impair MCT in patients under MV.