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]
(image: Smokersworld.info) You never see pregnant women smoking in public, but surveys say 12-25% of pregnant women in developed countries smoke during pregnancy. Of course they know they shouldn’t — with smoking’s increased risks for miscarriage, low birth weight, premature birth, birth defects, and even sudden infant death after delivery. Most pregnant women want badly [… read more]
Where should we set the dial for caloric delivery to our patients with acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)? Weak observational trials suggest low caloric intake might be associated with poor outcomes [ref1, 2]. On the other hand, other observational data suggests just the opposite: restricting calories early on may reduce ventilator [… read more]
Proton Pump Inhibitors No Help for Kids’ Asthma Gastroesophageal reflux (GER) is a mysterious co-conspirator with asthma. Many people with uncontrolled asthma have reflux (either symptomatic by history, or asymptomatic and detected on esophageal pH studies). Randomized trials in adults suggest that treating symptomatic GERD (gastroesophageal reflux DISEASE) improves asthma, but treating asymptomatic GER does not [… read more]
CPAP Improves Metabolic Syndrome in Obstructive Sleep Apnea This paper has been RETRACTED! Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy reversed elements of the high cardiovascular risk profile known as metabolic syndrome in a substantial minority of Indians with treatment-naive obstructive sleep apnea, according to this article in the New England Journal of Medicine. More than [… read more]
Does Enoxaparin Prophylaxis Really Help Most Hospitalized Patients? A huge randomized trial (LIFENOX) stunned experts by showing no benefit of enoxaparin prophylaxis in preventing pulmonary embolism or all-cause mortality in acutely ill medical patients, compared to knee-length graduated compression stockings alone. Ajay Kakkar, Claudio Cimminiello, Jean-Francois Bergmann et al report their surprising results in the [… 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]
Intensive Glucose Control: Safe for Critically Ill Kids’ Brains? After evangelizing globally for intensive glucose control (~100 mg/dL) to be the standard of care for virtually all critically ill adults for a decade, Greet van den Berghe might be disappointed that mounting evidence shows that a fanatical approach to maintenance of normoglycemia in critical illness [… read more]
(image: PneumRx) ATLANTA — In a small, open-label pilot study, bronchoscopically-placed metal coils that retract emphysematous lung, creating lung volume reduction without surgery, produced functional and airflow improvements in a majority of patients with severe COPD, the lead researcher reported at CHEST 2012. Investigators randomized 47 patients with severe emphysema type COPD to undergo either [… 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]
Contrast-induced nephropathy (kidney damage) is a serious problem that can occur after many medical tests and procedures, but coronary angiography (cardiac catheterization) is the main culprit. People with pre-existing renal disease are most susceptible to contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) — about 1 in 8 of them develop a “bump” in creatinine of >0.5 mg/dL after cardiac [… read more]
Like many other bodily functions, coughing is a complex phenomenon that is under both conscious and unconscious control. Coughing during an acute bronchitis or after inhaling a lungful of seawater is vigorous and involuntary. A slight tickle in the back of the throat that creeps up when we’re on a first date or in a [… read more]
Image: EIMJM.com Evidence-based practice guidelines adopted by critical care societies in Canada, Germany, Australia and New Zealand recommend starting enteral nutrition for critical illness shortly after admission to an ICU. In observational studies, critically ill adults get only about 50-70% their caloric goals from enteral feeding; reduced gastric motility is often responsible for the limited [… read more]
Chronic cough is the scourge both of the coughers themselves, and the doctors who treat them. Although rarely medically serious, chronic cough can be surprisingly debilitating by disrupting sufferers’ social and professional lives. Doctors, for their part, often feel frustrated and powerless in treating chronic cough. Although gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), asthma, ACE inhibitor use, [… 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]
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]
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]
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]
Chronic diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) account for at least 2/3 of medical care spending in the U.S. Policy makers, payers, and many physicians recognize that the outpatient clinic-based model is poorly suited to provide support in between physician visits, when most complications or exacerbations occur. Many hospitalizations and decline in function could [… read more]
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