Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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Measuring cardiac output is of paramount importance in the management of critically ill patients in the intensive care unit and of 'high risk' surgical patients in the operating room. Alternatives to thermodilution are now available and are gaining acceptance among practitioners who have been trained almost exclusively in the use of the pulmonary artery catheter. ⋯ No single method stands out or renders the others obsolete. By making cardiac output easily measurable, however, these techniques should all contribute to improvement in haemodynamic management.
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Based on several recently completed randomized controlled trials, cortisol replacement is likely to become a standard of care for vasopressor dependent septic shock. Further studies are needed in order to accomplish whether this treatment should be limited to patients with a blunted cortisol response to corticotrophin. Similarly, in patients with severe sepsis who do not need vasopressors, the benefit/risk ratio of cortisol replacement remains to be assessed.
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Comparative Study
Pro/con clinical debate: is high-frequency oscillatory ventilation useful in the management of adult patients with respiratory failure?
In neonatal and pediatric intensive care units, high-frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) has become an increasingly common therapy. This may not have been the case if researchers had not persisted in investigating the therapy after early disappointing clinical trials. Devices capable of providing this therapy to adults have become commercially available relatively recently. However, there are many questions that need to be answered regarding HFOV in adults: Is HFOV in adults superior to conventional mechanical ventilation? Who is the ideal candidate for HFOV? When should it be applied? What is the best technique with which to apply it? When should a patient on HFOV be converted back to conventional ventilation? What is the safety and efficacy of the device? As outlined in the following debate, there are several compelling arguments for and against the use of HFOV at this point in adults.
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General outcome prediction models developed for use with large, multicenter databases of critically ill patients may not correctly estimate mortality if applied to a particular group of patients that was under-represented in the original database. The development of new diagnostic weights has been proposed as a method of adapting the general model - the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II in this case - to a new group of patients. ⋯ In this issue of Critical Care, Arabi and co-workers present the results of the validation of a modified model of the APACHE II system for patients receiving orthotopic liver transplants. The use of a highly heterogeneous database for which not all important variables were taken into account and of a sample too small to use the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test appropriately makes their conclusions uncertain.