(From Dr. Philippe Rola) Join us for a couple of days of awesome learning in an awesome city! Back, bigger and better for its second iteration, this multispecialty cross-training exercise brings you the cutting and bleeding edge of acute care management of the sick patient, from the ED to the wards or the ICU. Combining [… read more]
Severe hyponatremia (often defined as a serum sodium < 120 mEq/L) occurs most often in people with pituitary or lung tumors, those taking antipsychotic or other neuroleptic drugs, heavy beer drinkers, or the elderly. Usually sodium levels decline slowly over weeks or months prior to detection, allowing time for the brain to compensate, with only [… read more]
by Ed Susman, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today SAN DIEGO — Noninvasive ventilation aimed for use at home by late-stage patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) actually saves patients and the healthcare system money by helping to keep individuals out of the hospital and doctors’ offices, researchers said here. Nightly home noninvasive ventilation (commonly called BiPAP) was [… read more]
Oral Anticoagulants in the ICU: A summary of the evidence for efficacy in atrial fibrillation, venous thromboembolism, and unique clinical cases Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) are recommended as the preferred treatment for venous thromboembolism (VTE) and as a first-line option for stroke prevention in nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF), but warfarin may be preferred in certain [… read more]
Well-done bag-mask ventilation can produce adequate gas exchange for the vast majority of cardiac arrest patients, but does not provide a secure airway and is physically taxing. Patients in cardiac arrest undergoing CPR tend to immediately receive bag-mask ventilation, which is often interrupted to perform endotracheal intubation. To facilitate intubation, chest compressions may also be [… read more]
Procalcitonin (PCT) is an FDA-approved test for use in guiding clinical decisions on starting, continuing, or stopping antibiotics in patients with lower respiratory tract infections, such as community-acquired pneumonia. Procalcitonin is also approved for use in determining whether to stop antibiotics. Most of the small studies testing procalcitonin-driven algorithms have shown the method to be generally safe [… read more]
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved dupilumab (Dupixent, Sanofi/Regeneron) as “add-on maintenance therapy in patients with moderate-to-severe asthma aged 12 years and older with an eosinophilic phenotype or with oral corticosteroid-dependent asthma,” according to the manufacturer’s news release. In randomized trials, asthmatic patients with higher blood eosinophil counts (≥ 150 cells/µL) failing corticosteroid [… read more]
Neither typical antipsychotics (haloperidol) or newer antipsychotics (ziprasidone) were effective in treating delirium in critically ill patients, in a major randomized trial. The results call into question widely used pharmacologic treatments for ICU delirium. Authors enrolled 1,183 adult patients at medical or surgical ICUs at 16 U.S. medical centers who developed delirium while critically ill [… read more]
How many days of steroids should be taken by people with COPD exacerbations severe enough to require hospitalization? In 2013, the REDUCE trial (JAMA) suggested five days of systemic corticosteroids are as good as longer 10-14 day courses, among 314 patients hospitalized with severe COPD exacerbations. This contradicted the prevailing GOLD guidelines at the time, [… read more]
Procalcitonin-driven algorithms did not lead to lower antibiotic use for suspected pneumonias in the emergency department, in a large randomized trial. The multicenter ProACT trial enrolled 1,656 patients presenting with symptoms of pneumonia at multiple emergency departments. Patients were randomized to receive care guided by procalcitonin results (with thresholds to guide initiation or withholding of antibiotics), [… read more]
A new meta-analysis adds to the evidence that liberal use of supplemental oxygen may be harmful in acutely ill, hospitalized patients. Authors performed a meta-analysis of 25 randomized trials of acutely ill patients (total n ~ 16,000) treated with strategies of either “low” or “high” supplemental oxygenation. Although the cutoffs varied between studies, patients receiving [… read more]
The CDC warned in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that dentists may be at significantly higher risk for developing idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, compared to the general population. In a sample of 894 patients with IPF with records over 20 years at a Virginia specialty clinic, CDC discovered that 8 dentists (and one dental technician) [… read more]
In the lungs of patients with severe emphysema (COPD), relatively large spaces previously containing lung tissue (obliterated by smoking) become filled with stagnant air that doesn’t circulate with breathing. This ominously-named “dead-space ventilation” reduces the overall mechanical efficiency of breathing, often causing disabling dyspnea. Lung volume reduction surgery (cutting out the dead space, usually at [… read more]
by Salynn Boyles, MedPage Today Contributing Writer Treatment with the first approved once-daily, single inhaler triple therapy for COPD resulted in a significantly lower rate of exacerbations, as well as better lung function and quality of life compared to dual therapy in patients with a history of exacerbations, researchers reported. Results from the huge IMPACT trial supported an [… read more]
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is an accepted salvage therapy for severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) after conventional mechanical ventilation with low tidal volumes, neuromuscular blockade and prone positioning have failed. ECMO has been proposed as the ultimate lung protection strategy for ARDS, because it bypasses the lungs entirely. So why shouldn’t it be first-line [… read more]
Brain damage with severe cognitive and functional impairment are common after cardiac arrest, but far from universal. Even after thorough testing, most comatose patients receive an indeterminate neurologic prognosis post-arrest. Physicians faced with this uncertainty have a difficult task in counseling family members trying to make decisions to maximize their loved one’s chances for recovery [… read more]
As the use of chest CT-angiograms in emergency departments and medical wards has risen by more than tenfold, so has the discovery of small pulmonary emboli of unclear clinical significance. These PEs are often isolated to distal (subsegmental) branches of the pulmonary artery, without concurrent deep venous thrombosis (DVT). Small distal PEs may be incidentally [… read more]
Each week that a patient with a new diagnosis of early lung cancer awaits surgery significantly increases the risk for tumor growth, spread and “upstaging,” according to an analysis of thousands of patients. Patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) had a 4% increased risk of upstaging generally (to stage II, III, or [… read more]
Two-week antibiotic courses have been considered standard care for most patients with bacteremia who do not have sepsis or an untreated primary source (e.g. endocarditis). No good evidence ever supported the practice, which was supported mainly by retrospective data in patients with sepsis. A new study suggests that treating gram-negative bacteremia for seven days is [… read more]
by Ed Susman, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today SAN DIEGO – Patients diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who are also on aspirin therapy appear to have a lower rate of COPD exacerbations, researchers reported at the annual conference of the American Thoracic Society. The risk of experiencing any acute exacerbation of COPD was reduced by 18% among [… read more]
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