Critical Care Alert – July 1, 2007

July 1, 2007

• Emergency Colectomy For Fulminant C. Difficile Colitis

  Using laboratory results from a recent 30-month period for case finding, Lamontagne and colleagues reviewed the medical records of all patients with fulminant Clostridium difficile-associated disease (CDAD) who received care in the ICUs of 2 tertiary-care hospitals in Quebec.

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• Special Feature: Three Current Controversies in Mechanical Ventilation

  The literature on the technical and clinical aspects of mechanical ventilation for patients with acute respiratory failure continues to expand, with nearly 50,000 citations appearing in PubMed for the topic "mechanical ventilation," and more than a thousand articles in English reporting the results of clinical trials under this heading published during the last 5 years.

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• For Ventilated Patients, Is Sleep Better with PAV Than with Pressure Support?

  The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of patient-ventilator dys-synchrony in the etiology of sleep disruption, and to determine whether optimizing patient-ventilator interactions by using proportional assist ventilation (PAV) improves sleep.

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• Pharmacology Watch: Avandia, Risk of Congestive Heart Failure Significant Safety Risk

  Aspirin, Higher Doses No More Effective, Risky; Subclinical Hypothyroidism Treatment Benefits; FDA approvals

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• Clinical Briefs in Primary Care supplement

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