C. difficile has always been a foul and disgusting adversary, but lately it’s becoming more formidable and deadly, according to Linda Bobo, Erik Dubberke and Marin Kollef. A few highlights of this excellent review: C.diff infections (CDI) have more than doubled since 2001, to > 340,000 discharges in 2008. Attributable mortality is 6-7%, but may [... read more]
As you know, the risk for DVT and PE in the ICU are high. How high? Depends on how you count them. Asymptomatic, ultrasound-surveillance-detected DVTs have an incidence of 5-10% during the ICU stay (from the PROTECT trial and a 2005 series), even when patients receive proper thromboprophylaxis. The incidence is even higher (up to 80%) in trauma [... read more]
Himani Gupta, Prateek Gupta, and Lee Morrow of Creighton have done us all a favor by mining a national database (the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program) to create and validate a risk calculator for perioperative pulmonary complications, which they unveil in the November CHEST. Pulmonologists are consulted every day to weigh in on the risk [... read more]
Intra-abdominal hypertension (defined as a sustained urinary bladder pressure > 12 mm Hg) may be an under-recognized problem in the ICU, especially in patients after abdominal surgery or who have gone massive volume resuscitation with blood and/or fluids (think hemorrhage, burns and sepsis). When high abdominal pressures (> 20 mm Hg sustained) cause organ failure and/or [... read more]
[poll id="3"] A 2005 meta-analysis of 5 studies (n=406) concluded that early tracheostomy reduced need for mechanical ventilation and ICU days. But then a 2006 randomized trial in trauma patients found no benefit to early trach, and an underpowered 2008 RCT also found no benefit. In a new meta-analysis and systematic review of 7 trials (n=1,044), Fei [... read more]
Many argue that as a limited resource serving unlimited needs, medical care is “rationed” by definition, and ICU resources (being more limited and expensive) are simply more overtly rationed. For example, in France, ICU admission is often denied to the very elderly critically ill, explicitly because of their age (this happens in the U.K., too, probably). In the U.S., [... read more]
One thing I thought I knew was that overweight and obesity cause coronary artery disease and make it worse. People with CAD who are obese should lose weight … right? Recent research shows it’s not that simple (although the answer is still “yes, probably”). Did you know about the “obesity paradox?” Or the “lean paradox,” [... read more]
Ultrasound is the future. It’s even better than that: it’s the present. So say proponents Seth Koenig, Mangala Narasimhan and pioneer & innovator Paul Mayo in this month’s CHEST review. They endorse a “paradigm shift” meaning, in effect, you get professionally trained on this highly versatile, effective, and immediate-results-providing modality and integrate it into your routine [... read more]
Each individual episode of critical illness produces a mushroom cloud of data, most of which dissipates without being recorded at all (think realtime infusion rates of vasopressors and continuous ECG monitoring). A few large databases capture outcomes data from multiple participating hospitals (like the National Inpatient Sample), and the new MIMIC-II integrated data system can [... read more]
Walkey et al combined 8 randomized trials including 1,641 people with MRSA pneumonia, and found no significant differences between those treated with linezolid or vancomycin in survival, resolution of clinical pneumonia, eradication from sputum of MRSA, or adverse events. Authors dispute linezolid’s supposedly higher lung penetration, pointing out that that dogma evolved from studies of healthy people; [... read more]
Moores LK et al. Current Approach to the Diagnosis of Acute Nonmassive Pulmonary Embolism. CHEST 2011;140:509-518. Review. Where is the best area under the curve, or the “overdiagnosis sweet spot?” It seems no approach gets us off the hook as we seek to avoid anticoagulating people without PEs (without missing any, of course): CT-angiography is more sensitive [... read more]
Wijesinghe et al randomized and crossed-over 24 people who were recently diagnosed with obesity hypoventilation syndrome to breathe either 100% oxygen or room air for 20 minutes on 2 separate days, while measuring their minute ventilation, expired tidal pCO2, and dead space-to-tidal volume ratio. In 44% of patients, pCO2 increased by at least 4 mm [... read more]
For one year, Dallas et al prospectively followed 2,060 intubated MICU/SICU patients at Barnes-Jewish, and concluded that 83 (4%) developed VAP and 28 (1.4%) got VAT, which was defined as fever and 100,000 CFUs in tracheal secretions, without an infiltrate. By their reckoning, a third of VATs progressed to VAPs. Pathogens (mainly MDR bacteria) overlapped. [... read more]
Severe sepsis has had a 35-45% mortality rate in clinical trials. Gagan Kumar et al use national observational data to suggest that while population rates of severe sepsis are increasing, survival has likely improved, with mortality falling from 39% to 27%, 2000-2007. However, most of the new survivors are not going home, but rather to [... read more]
Sildenafil looks to be reasonably safe and efficacious for long-term treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension with NYHA class II or III symptoms, according to results of the SUPER-2 trial. This was an extension of SUPER-1, reported in NEJM 2005, which was a 12-week randomized trial in people with PAH and NYHA II/III symptoms, in which those taking [... read more]
The elderly have been largely excluded from clinical trials on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), as their surgical risks have been perceived as too high to benefit as a group from lung resection. Many people believe that in practice, elderly people with NSCLC have often been excluded from consideration for lung resection solely based on [... read more]
Ischemic heart disease makes COPD symptoms worse both at rest and during exacerbations, without increasing the frequency of COPD exacerbations, according to an epidemiologic study by Patel et al. They prospectively observed 386 Londoners with COPD for one year, 64 of whom had ischemic heart disease (with or without history of myocardial infarction, defined by [... read more]
Non-invasive positive pressure ventilation (NIPPV or NPPV or NIV), overnight or during the day, has not been shown to help most people with stable COPD and daytime hypercarbia. Citing their own previous findings, Dreher, Windisch et al argue that’s because you can’t just use wimpy ordinary settings — you’ve got to crank that sucker to [... read more]
Zhang et al pooled 20 studies that compared ultrasound, chest X-ray, or both against a reference standard (usually CT scan) for the diagnosis of pneumothorax. Chest X-ray had a pooled sensitivity of 52% and specificity 99% for diagnosis of pneumothorax. Ultrasound’s pooled sensitivity was 88% and specificity, 100%. Unsurprisingly, the accuracy of ultrasonography to diagnose [... read more]
Skeletal muscle dysfunction is common in people with COPD, although debate exists as to whether that’s simply due to deconditioning, or something more. In people with severe COPD (GOLD stage III and IV), it’s known that pulmonary rehabilitation improves some of these muscle abnormalities. Vogiatzis et al report the results of putting 46 people with [... read more]