Critical Care

In this thematic series for Critical Care, the focus is on important recent developments and state-of-the art practice in the field of cardiac arrest.

Cardiac arrest is a major public health problem. Many thousands of people have a cardiac arrest each year worldwide, many of whom will be admitted to the ICU, where urgent and appropriate treatment is essential to their survival. Mortality rates remain high, however, and keeping up-to-date with the very latest clinical practice evidence is crucial for the ICU physician to ensure optimum patient management.

This will be a series of commentaries focused on a particular aspect that changed in our ICU: the way we make rounds, we allow family presence, we monitor patients, we use echo techniques and apply renal replacement therapy, etc. These comments should bring some guidance to others to improve quality of care.

Current management of patients with stroke, traumatic brain injury, sepsis, and even general critical illness are subject to requiring therapeutics that often involve complex neurological assessment, monitoring, and interventions. In this series, we have compiled several articles, each succinctly reviewing the latest information with respect to Septic-Encephalopathy, Critical Illness Weakness & Neuropathy, EEG Utility in the ICU, Ventilation Concerns & Therapeutics in TBI & Stroke, and a Clinical Algorithm for Neurological Multi-Modal Monitoring.

This new Thematic Series focus on all aspects related to the future of Intensive Care Medicine, including but not limited to: organization, staffing, monitoring systems, new therapies, future organ support systems, ethical aspects.

After so many negative randomized, controlled trials, that have evaluated a number of simplified therapeutic interventions that could be applied to large patient populations, people are turning their interest back to personalized medicine. This new Thematic Series will share thoughts based on scientific data and help the clinician to individualize the different aspects of the patient management.