The use of controlled mechanical ventilation (CMV) in patients who experience weaning failure after a spontaneous breathing trial or after extubation is a strategy based on the premise that respiratory muscle fatigue (requiring rest to recover) is the cause of weaning failure. Recent evidence, however, does not support the existence of low frequency fatigue (the type of fatigue that is long-las...

Heart rate variability in the frequency domain can now be obtained at the bedside in the ICU. Promising data suggest that it may help to characterize a patient response to a spontaneous breathing trial. Refinement of the analysis could even help to predict the outcome of extubation or at least help to detect early patients at risk of failure. It is possible that combining this type of analysis,...

BACKGROUND Maintenance of spontaneous breathing is advocated in mechanical ventilation. This study evaluates the effect of spontaneous breathing on regional lung characteristics during high-frequency oscillatory (HFO) ventilation in an animal model of mild lung injury. METHODS Lung injury was induced by lavage with normal saline in eight pigs (weight range 47-64 kg). HFO ventilation was appli...

Methods This is a subsequent analysis of the original prospective observational study run in 36 intensive care units in France, Spain and Switzerland over a three month period. All patients requiring intubation and MV were enrolled. MV modality, results of spontaneous breathing trials (SBT) and extubation, therapeutic limitation as well as survival were daily collected until ICU discharge or da...

BACKGROUND Predicting whether an obese critically ill patient can be successfully extubated may be specially challenging. Several weaning tests have been described but no physiological study has evaluated the weaning test that would best reflect the post-extubation inspiratory effort. METHODS This was a physiological randomized crossover study in a medical and surgical single-center Intensive...

Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Medical Society. In the United States, almost 800,000 patients who are hospitalized each year require mechanical ventilation.1 This estimate excludes neonates, and there is little doubt that mechanical ventilation will be increasingly used as the number of patients 65 years of age or older continues to increase.2,3 The majority of patients who receive mechanical v...