Articles: patients.
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Several data support the view that impairment of the inflammatory-immune response is a hallmark of severe sepsis and the level and time of recovery to immunocompetence has a major impact on the clinical outcome of ICU patients. Recent studies demonstrate that improvement of anti-tumour immune response by targeting negative regulatory molecules, such as CD25, chronic T-lymphocyte activation antigen 4, and programmed death-1 receptor (PD-1)/PD-1 L, offers a novel opportunity to prevent or even reverse progression of tumour growth in experimental models and patients. ⋯ Consequently, targeting negative molecules in sepsis can reverse immunoparalysis and improve survival in experimental sepsis, as shown by Chang and colleagues in a recent issue of Critical Care. This opens new opportunities to overcome overwhelming downregulation of the adaptive immune response to prevent and/or improve recovery from sepsis.
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Editorial Comment
Video laryngoscopy improves intubation success and reduces esophageal intubations compared with direct laryngoscopy in the medical intensive care unit.
Urgent and emergent airway management outside the operating room is fraught with complications due to the nature of its acuity, single or multiple system dysfunction or failure, and physiological disturbances. These provide a challenge to the airway team and place the patient at grave risk for potentially life-threatening airway and hemodynamics-related consequences. ⋯ Yet to assume that airway management difficulties can be erased by incorporating a new device is optimistic but naïve. In regard to patient safety, the device is just one piece of the airway puzzle.
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Editorial Comment
A protocol guided by transpulmonary thermodilution and lactate levels for resuscitation of patients with severe burns.
Over-resuscitation is deleterious in many critically ill conditions, including major burns. For more than 15 years, several strategies to reduce fluid administration in burns during the initial resuscitation phase have been proposed, but no single or simple parameter has shown superiority. ⋯ The authors' results confirm that resuscitation can be achieved with below-normal levels of preload but at the price of a fluid administration greater than predicted by the Parkland formula (2 to 4 mL/kg per% burn). The classic approach based on an adapted Parkland equation may still be the simplest until further studies identify the optimal bundle of resuscitation goals.