Journal of wound care
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Journal of wound care · Jun 2020
ReviewPrevention of pressure ulcers among individuals cared for in the prone position: lessons for the COVID-19 emergency.
Pressure ulcers (PUs) involve the destruction of skin and underlying tissue due to prolonged pressure and shear forces. These ulcers are painful and significantly reduce a person's quality of life. PUs are also expensive to manage and impact negatively on the achievement of cost-effective, efficient care delivery. ⋯ Given the importance of PU prevention in this cohort of patients, adopting a focused prevention strategy, including skin assessment and care, offloading and pressure redistribution, and dressings for prevention may contribute to a reduction in the incidence and prevalence of these largely preventable wounds.
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Journal of wound care · May 2020
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy in preventing mechanical ventilation in COVID-19 patients: a retrospective case series.
A pandemic afflicts the entire world. The highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and rapidly spread across the entire globe. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)has infected more than two million people worldwide, causing over 160,000 deaths. Patients with COVID-19 disease present with a wide array of symptoms, ranging from mild flu-like complaints to life threatening pulmonary and cardiac complications. Older people and patients with underlying disease have an increased risk of developing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) requiring mechanical ventilation. Once intubated, mortality increases exponentially. A number of pharmacologic regimens, including hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin, antiviral therapy (eg, remdesevir), and anti-IL-6 agents (e.g., toclizumab), have been highlighted by investigators over the course of the pandemic, based on the therapy's potential to interrupt the viral life-cycle of SARS-CoV-2 or preventing cytokine storm. At present, there have been no conclusive series of reproducible randomised clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy of any one drug or therapy for COVID-19. ⋯ This small sample of patients exhibited dramatic improvement with HBOT. Most importantly, HBOT potentially prevented the need for mechanical ventilation. Larger studies are likely to define the role of HBOT in the treatment of this novel disease.