Clinical intensive care : international journal of critical & coronary care medicine
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Clin Intensive Care · Jan 1993
A tool to measure the change in health status of selected adult patients before and after intensive care.
If the effect of intensive care on the patient is to be fully assessed then the health status of patients before and after admission to ICU must be measured. The validity of a simplified system which can also use relatives, where necessary, as informants on the patients' pre-morbid health status has been evaluated. In a District General Hospital Intensive Care Unit a questionnaire based survey of 85 patients admitted over a period of eight months used a new specially-designed instrument and compared this with the Functional Limitations Profile (FLP) and the Perceived Quality of Life instrument (PQL). ⋯ At six months post ICU discharge, 49 patients completed the follow-up questionnaires, 12 patients had died and three were too confused to co-operate. Twenty-one patients (25%) were lost to follow-up. At one year post ICU discharge, 43 patients completed the follow-up questionnaires, one other patient had died and three still remained confused.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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Clin Intensive Care · Jan 1993
Comparative StudyReproducibility and comparison of cardiac output measurement by transthoracic bioimpedance and thermodilution methods in critically ill patients.
The short-term reproducibility in cardiac output (CO) and stroke volume (SV) measurements by transthoracic electrical bioimpedance (TEB) and thermodilution (TH) and their agreement were studied in 31 consecutive patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). For comparison of changes in CO and SV, six patients were studied separately. TEB data were not obtainable in four patients due to interference with impedance signals or heart rate detection. ⋯ For SV, the regression equation was TEB=-0.23+0.823 (TH); (p less than 0.0005, r=0.86). When only changes were considered, the mean difference (TH-TEB) was -0.5 (SD 0.9) l/min for CO and -4 (SD 8) ml for SV. There was significant correlation in the changes detected by each method.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)