By Dr. Philippe Rola I was recently scanning the literature in preparation for our symposium, and came across what should have been a 2003 instead of a 2013 publication in the March issue of the CCM Journal, entitled “Point-of-Care Ultrasound to estimate Central Venous Pressure: A Comparison of Three Techniques.” I have to admit this [… read more]
Staph Vaccine Fails in Cardiothoracic Surgery Patients Staphyloccocus aureus wound infections and bacteremia commonly complicate cardiothoracic surgery, even with meticulous attention to infection prevention. Staph mediastinitis, a deep infection of the surgical wound, is particularly feared and lethal. Vance Fowler et al randomized 8,031 people undergoing sternotomy to receive the V710 vaccine against S. aureus, [… read more]
Killer Carbapenem-Resistant Bacteria Spreading Across U.S. Gut-living bacteria like Klebsiella are gaining resistance to carbapenems at an alarming rate, and long-term acute care hospitals (LTACs) and nursing homes seem to be the incubators for these killer bugs spreading across the U.S. Carbapenems like meropenem and doripenem have been the gold standard to treat infections from [… read more]
“Like this … kind of” Passive Leg Raise Improved Management of Patients in Shock* (*some assembly required) by Blair Westerly, MD Providing the right amount of fluid is vital in a critically ill patient, as both too little and too much can result in poor outcomes. Yet even with this understanding, the clinical assessment of [… read more]
Fecal Transplants Cure C. difficile Infections, When Drugs Can’t Antibiotics are what cause Clostridium difficile infection to emerge in the first place, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the usual treatment — more antibiotics — often fails. From 15-25% of patients with C. difficile are not permanently cured by their initial treatment with metronidazole, and among those [… read more]
Time to Retire Routine Replacement of Peripheral IVs Study question: Do peripheral I.V.s need to be changed every 72-96 hours per the CDCs recommendations or can they be changed as clinically indicated? How many times as a resident did you receive a call at 4 a.m., often at the very moment you were about to [… read more]
Etomidate: Unsafe for Intubation in Patients with Sepsis? by Blair Westerly, MD Etomidate is commonly used for rapid sequence intubation; however, even after one dose, it has been associated with adrenal axis suppression in critically ill patients. Though both adrenal insufficiency and increased mortality in sepsis have been associated with etomidate, the relationship of the [… read more]
Azithromycin for non-CF Bronchiectasis Bronchiectasis — the permanently dilated, tortuous bronchi that can result after previous lung infections — is a frustrating problem for pulmonologists to treat, but not nearly as frustrating as it can be for patients to live with. People with bronchiectasis are plagued by chronic coughing, and many experience a steady decline [… read more]
“We’ve got to get that femoral line out of there!” The attending’s face as he says it shadowed with a simmer of fear, a dash of anger. How could the moonlighter have been so incompetent or lazy as to choose the benighted femoral site for a central venous line when the internal jugular and subclavian [… read more]
It started with a friendly pro/con debate in the December 2011 Chest, about whether lactate clearance or mixed venous oxygen saturation is a better “goal” for early goal-directed therapy in severe sepsis and septic shock. It ended with Alan Jones reviving rumors and innuendo that have swirled around Emanuel Rivers’s 2001 sepsis trial, and by extension his entire body [… read more]
Hydroxyethyl Starch (Voluven) Causes Kidney Failure In Large Trial Hydroxyethyl starch (HES) was already wearing a scarlet letter as an potentially dangerous volume resuscitation agent for patients in shock, after evidence emerged this year that hydroxyethyl starch kills people with severe sepsis. Now, another huge, convincing trial shows that hydroxyethyl starch (Voluven) damages kidneys and [… read more]
(image: Rxhealthdrugs.com) People taking 5 days of azithromycin had a very small absolute increased risk of death, especially due to cardiovascular causes, compared to people taking amoxicillin, in a retrospective cohort review by Wayne Ray, Katherine Murray, and C. Michael Stein published in the May 17 New England Journal of Medicine. Erythromycin and clarithromycin (the other [… read more]
Recombinant human activated protein C or dotrecogin alfa — better known as Xigris, by Eli Lilly — seemed a godsend when it was first approved for treatment of severe sepsis in 2001. Xigris’ FDA approval (despite an evenly split 10-10 vote) was based solely on the Eli Lilly-funded PROWESS study, a phase 3 randomized trial [… read more]
More: Surviving Sepsis Guidelines Review / Update The Surviving Sepsis Campaign is a collaboration between the U.S. Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, and the International Sepsis Forum, whose recommendations on the management of sepsis are considered widely. At the 2012 SCCM meeting, the Surviving Sepsis committee revealed [… read more]
(image: Wikipedia) In the TIME2 randomized trial published in the June 13 2012 JAMA, indwelling pleural catheters and talc pleurodesis were equivalent at reducing dyspnea over the 6 weeks following the procedure among 106 patients with malignant pleural effusions. Most patients receiving pleural catheters required no hospital stays, and overall had fewer repeat procedures than those [… read more]
Colloids are believed to be more effective expanders of plasma volume than crystalloids, making them a tempting therapy to use for patients in septic shock and other causes of hemodynamic instability. Problem is, some colloid solutions seem to kill people. The VISEP Trial using hydroxyethyl starch 200 kDa/0.5 demonstrated that this high molecular weight HES [… read more]
Linezolid (Zyvox) for XDR-TB: New Hope, New Caution Approved by the FDA in 2000 for drug-resistant gram positive bacterial infections, linezolid (Zyvox, Pfizer) has in clinical practice been mainly used for skin infections and the occasional pneumonia due to methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA). Now linezolid looks to be effective as an adjunct therapy for multi-drug resistant [… read more]
Does Normal Saline Cause Acute Renal Failure? To internal medicine-trained physicians in the U.S., normal saline solution seems as harmless and healthy as mother’s milk. Intensivists trained in anesthesia or surgery might more often mention normal saline’s hypertonicity compared to blood, and its propensity to cause hyperchloremia, compared to lactated Ringer’s or similar solutions. But [… read more]
Extra Vitamin D Doesn’t Prevent Colds in Healthy Adults (JAMA) It looks like you can add Vitamin D to list of supplements (echinacea, vitamin C, etc.) who’ve gone up against the common cold and lost. (Scorekeepers will note that zinc held its own, though, in a Cochrane analysis.) Vitamin D plays an important role in immune responses, [… read more]
Surviving Sepsis Guidelines’ Criteria for Sepsis Diagnosis See all the Surviving Sepsis Guidelines PulmCCM is not affiliated with the Surviving Sepsis Guidelines or the Surviving Sepsis Campaign which is at http://www.survivingsepsis.org. According to the Surviving Sepsis Guidelines, a sepsis diagnosis requires the presence of infection, which can be proven or suspected, and 2 or more of [… read more]
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