This article discusses basic features of nutritional support in critically-ill patients: general indications, the route of administration and the optimal timing for the introduction of feeding. Although these features form the bedrock of nutritional support, most of the questions related to these issues are lacking answers based on the highest grade of evidence. Moreover, prospective randomized...

INTRODUCTION This study aims to determine the attitudes of Asian elderly patients towards invasive life support measures, the degree of patient-surrogate concordance in end-of-life decision making, the extent to which patients desire autonomy over end-of-life medical decisions, the reasons behind patients' and surrogates' decisions, and the main factors influencing patients' and surrogates' dec...

We studied 118 patients with prolonged critical illness to determine if there would be a difference in outcome between patients managed by university-based (UB) or community-based (CB) intensivists. Patients consecutively admitted to a long-term acute care hospital were assigned in an arbitrary manner to the UB service or CB service. Patient survival, length of stay, and success and length of t...

Critical care medicine in China has made great advances in recent decades. This has led to an unavoidable issue: end-of-life ethics. With advances in medical technology and therapeutics allowing the seemingly limitless maintenance of life, the exact time of death of an individual patient is often determined by the decision to limit life support. How to care for patients at the end of life is no...

In their current review, Weijs and colleagues highlight the importance of protein and amino acid provision for improving clinical outcome in critically ill patients. The interdependence between energy and protein is highlighted. They call for urgent research to develop new methods to evaluate protein and amino acid requirements, accurately and conveniently, in order to optimize nutrition suppor...

The role of the services described in this paper is to support decisions in the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) domain. Those services are perceived as the most fundamental functionalities, that will serve as a basis for the planned European simulation centre for modelling the behaviour of Critical Infrastructures (CI). The proposed services are: CIrelated data accessing and gathering,...

Protecting critical infrastructures (CIs) against external and internal risks in an increasingly uncertain environment is a major challenge. In this paper we present a generic multi-stage scenario construction approach that is applicable to a wide range of decision problems in the field of CI protection. Our approach combines scenario construction and decision support, whereby we explicitly con...