Mechanical ventilation is an integral part of the critical care environment and requires orchestration by a multidisciplinary team of clinicians to optimize therapeutic outcomes. By tradition, pharmacists have not been included on this team since this therapeutic modality is not considered relevant to their scope of practice. However, pharmacists play a critical role in the management of patien...

0. A., and Swyer, P. R., (1970). Archives of Disease in Childhood, 45, 624. Mechanical ventilation in respiratory distress syndrome: a controlled trial. A controlled study of mechanical ventilation has been performed in infants with respiratory distress syndrome. 168 infants in respiratory failure were ventilated and 53 similar infants were not. Artificial mechanical ventilation improved surviv...

Mechanical ventilation can be life-saving for patients with acute respiratory failure. In between the 2 extremes of complete and no ventilatory support, both patient and machine contribute to ventilatory work. Ideally, ventilator gas delivery would perfectly match patient demand. This patient-ventilator interaction depends on how the ventilator responds to patient respiratory effort and, in tur...

While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) helped launch online crowd work in 2005, a myriad of newer vendors now offer alternative feature sets and workflow models for accomplishing quality crowd work. Unfortunately, research on crowd work has remained largely focused on AMT, with little exploration of other platforms. Such near-exclusive focus on AMT risks its particular vagaries and limitations ov...

Mechanical ventilation can be perceived as a treatment with a very narrow therapeutic window, i.e., highly efficient but with considerable side effects if not used properly and in a timely manner. Protocols and guidelines have been designed to make mechanical ventilation safer and protective for the lung. However, variable effects and low compliance with use of written protocols have been repor...

The ability to compensate for life-threatening failure of respiratory function is perhaps the signature technology of intensive care medicine. Unchanging needs for providing effective life-support with minimized risk and optimized comfort have been, are now, and will be the principal objectives of providing mechanical ventilation. Important lessons acquired over nearly half-a-century of ICU car...

Failure to transition patient from controlled mechanical ventilation to spontaneous breathing trials (SBTs) in a timely fashion is associated with significant morbidity and mortality in the intensive care unit. In addition, weaning failures are common in patients with limited cardiac reserves. Recent advances in cardiac echocardiography and laboratory measurement of serum biomarkers to assess h...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate by meta-analysis the effects of dexmedetomidine versus midazolam on postoperative delirium in patients that received postoperative mechanical ventilation. METHODS The electronic databases of PubMed, Web of Science, EMbase, CNKI, CBM, Cochrane library and WanFang were searched by two reviewers. All the clinical studies related to dexmedetomidine versus midazolam on postop...

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between short-term nutritional adequacy received while in the ICU and long-term outcomes including 6-month survival and health-related quality of life in critically ill patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of data prospectively collected in the context of a multicenter randomized controlled trial. SETTING An ...

BACKGROUND Adequate assessment and control of sedation play crucial roles in the proper performance of mechanical ventilation. METHODS A total of 30 patients with various pulmonary diseases were prospectively enrolled. The study population was randomized into two groups. The sedation assessment group (SAG) received active protocol-based control of sedation, and in the empiric control group (E...