(image: Wikipedia) There are an estimated 200,000 pleural effusions due to malignancy each year in the U.S. alone, and these represent an important cause of suffering and limitation in functional ability for people living with advanced cancer. Pleurodesis (using talc or other sclerosants) and placement of indwelling pleural catheters are both accepted, reasonable approaches to the [… read more]
Management of Opioid Overdose in the ICU: Review (More PulmCCM Topic Updates) Thanks to a 700% increase in the number of opioid prescriptions for pain management, combined with a perhaps greater rise in the rate of prescription opioid abuse, the number of serious opioid overdoses in the US has climbed dramatically over the past decade. [… read more]
Superior Vena Cava Syndrome: A Cancer-Related Medical Emergency (More PulmCCM Topic Updates) Multiple cancers are expected to rise in prevalence in the U.S. over the coming decades, and so is the risk for cancer-related medical emergencies. For a few, superior vena cava syndrome (SVC syndrome) will be the first manifestation of their cancer. It’s important [… read more]
We may see it more often, but we doctors don’t really know anything more about death than anyone else, and we find it just as scary. Yet we are expected to spontaneously discuss death-as-a-coming-event with seriously ill patients who (we assume) probably want to avoid the subject, well, like the plague. Maybe they do. But [… read more]
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) unfortunately recurs even more often than other cancers, even when early stage and apparently completely resected. The explanation, of course, is it wasn’t completely resected: there was residual metastatic disease hiding out somewhere, but in such microscopic quantities as to be undetectable by our improving but still crude techniques (i.e., [… read more]
Pulmonologists become fairly good semi-professional chest radiologists simply by showing up, paying attention and working hard during their training, and making an effort to keep learning throughout their careers. We have the advantage over radiologists of actually being able to “clinically correlate” the findings with what’s really going on, and to integrate that into our understanding [… read more]
In the first randomized trial of its kind, patients with severe sepsis or septic shock who were given meropenem alone had equivalent clinical outcomes to patients who were given combination therapy including meropenem and moxifloxacin. The results, reported in JAMA, provide ethical support to critical care physicians who prefer to be conservative antibiotic stewards. But [… read more]
Cancer-Related Medical Emergencies: Acute Tumor Lysis Syndrome (More PulmCCM Topic Updates) The prevalence of multiple cancers are expected to rise in the United States over the coming decades. Despite improved survival with some cancers, some people with malignancy will develop cancer related emergencies; for a few, this will be the first manifestation of their cancer. [… read more]
Human recombinant granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF or Leukine) did not reduce ventilator-days in patients with acute lung injury / ARDS in a randomized trial published in the January 2012 Critical Care Medicine. Why would it have? Interestingly, patients with ARDS with higher levels of GM-CSF in their BAL fluid are more likely to survive. GM-CSF maintains [… read more]
Immunotherapy — creating antibodies to tumor markers, then activating the immune system to selectively kill cancer cells — is the newest and most-hyped frontier of oncology. And with some justification: the mechanism is cleaner and kinder than chemotherapy, and being a whole new treatment modality, can complement and augment traditional therapies. Results of immunotherapy in [… read more]
If you and your team just can’t get an arterial line into your critically ill, hypotensive patient for continuous invasive blood pressure measurement, you may be somewhat comforted by a study in Critical Care Medicine. Authors found that among 150 critically ill patients (83 of whom were in shock), mean arterial pressure (MAP) measurements with an [… read more]
For a great video example of dynamic extra-thoracic airway obstruction, click the below link to the July 5, 2012 New England Journal of Medicine. This 53-year-old woman had a traumatic laryngeal fracture as a child, and presented with daytime somnolence and inspiratory stridor. On laryngoscopy, she had proliferation of the mucosa over the vocal cords, [… read more]
(image: Wikipedia) Anyone who has ever rounded in an ICU with a nurse manager knows that challenging or questioning the utility of the ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) bundle is a losing proposition — one likely to get you labeled as a wiseguy troublemaker. Thanks to ventilator bundles’ endorsement by the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, [… read more]
Everyone knows that when you’re really sick, going to the ICU–that place with all the beeping monitors, hypervigilant staff, and high-tech invasive gadgetry–might save your life. But what if in certain situations, transfer to an ICU bed could actually worsen a person’s condition, or even hasten their demise? Hannah Wunsch of Columbia U. suggests it’s [… read more]
This gentleman (not pictured in the photo) graciously allowed himself to be videotaped in the midst of a severe whooping cough episode caused by Bordetella pertussis; the video is posted on the New England Journal’s website. He had not been vaccinated: vaccination during childhood greatly reduces the risk of severe or life-threatening pertussis infection, and reduces [… read more]
Acupuncture has danced on the fringes of mainstream Western medical therapy for decades. Acupuncture has been shown to improve numerous conditions –for example, reducing dyspnea in patients with cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a few randomized trials. But — unsurprisingly, given complementary medicine’s lack of funding and acceptance among traditional academics — [… read more]
Hospitals added palliative care services at a feverish pace throughout the 2000s, the Associated Press reported in a piece picked up by news outlets across the U.S. in June. While 658 hospitals reported having palliative care programs in 2000, 1,568 reported they offered palliative care services in 2009 — that’s over 60% of the hospitals [… read more]
Most studies on smoking and its well-known health risks have been performed in middle-aged adults (younger than 60). In a large epidemiological study published in the June 11, 2012 Archives of Internal Medicine, Carolin Gellert, Ben Schottker, and Hermann Brenner showed that (spoiler alert!!) smoking’s excess risks extend to older adults, as well. Just as importantly, [… read more]
Want to keep up with sleep, without falling asleep? We’ll try to make it easy for you: Here are some of the latest and most notable articles in sleep medicine. (This summary will be updated and re-posted as new research is published. Please suggest articles for inclusion in the comments or by email.) Obstructive Sleep [… read more]
The past decade has seen an explosion in the number of clinical trials; there are now more than 10,000 new trials registered each year. Although clinical trials’ quality is improving somewhat, most are still small and single-center and a large proportion do not adhere with reporting requirements, raising serious questions as to what we are [… read more]
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