Articles: intensive-care-units.
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Intensive care units have been considered stress generating areas. Knowing the causes why this happens will allow us to take specific measures to prevent or minimize it. This study has been performed with the aim to identify stress raising factors, as they are perceived by intensive care patients. ⋯ The level of stress perceived by patients was low. The factors considered as most stressing were those related to physical aspects; presence of tubes in nose and mouth, impossibility to sleep and presence of noise, whereas those less stressing referred to Nursing attention. We conclude that patients perceive ICU as a little stressing place in spite of the excessive noise, remark the presence of invasive tubes and the difficulty to sleep as the most stressing factors, and in the same way, express a high degree of satisfaction about the attention received.
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Intensive care medicine · Jun 1996
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyApplication of the APACHE III prognostic system in Brazilian intensive care units: a prospective multicenter study.
To compare patients and their outcomes at ten Brazilian intensive care units (ICUs) with those reported from the United States. ⋯ The APACHE III prognostic system was a good discriminator of hospital mortality for ICU admissions at 10 Brazilian ICUs. There was substantial and significant variation, however, in SMRs among the Brazilian ICUs, which suggests that further evaluations of international differences in intensive care using a common risk assessment system should be performed and factors associated with variations in risk-adjusted mortality scrutinized.
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Curr. Opin. Pediatr. · Jun 1996
ReviewNutritional support of the pediatric intensive care unit patient.
Nutritional support of the critically ill or postoperative pediatric patient continues to develop as a clinical science in the face of technologic, pharmacologic, and nutritional science advances. For ethical and logistical reasons, however, clinical trials of new technologies and interventions often are performed first in adult subjects, and the pediatric intensivist and nutritionist are thereby left to draw conclusions from this literature. ⋯ The central role of estimating energy requirements in the intensive care unit, the development of enteral formulas with nutritional as well as possible immunologic properties, the use of anabolic hormones to attenuate the catabolic response to illness, the concept of "conditionally essential" amino acids, and the propensity to use the parenteral route of nutrition when the enteral route is still available are discussed. Future directions in nutritional support, including the development of nutritional pharmacotherapy, are also considered.