Breast Cancer and Body Mass: When is it OK to be Too Little, Too Big, or Just Right?

Considering age when making treatment decisions in the ICU: too little, too much, or just right?

There are a number of studies providing evidence that age is associated with treatment decisions for critically ill adults, although most of these studies have been unable to fully account for both prehospital health status and severity of acute illness. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Turnbull and colleagues present a well-executed study analyzing data from a prospective cohort study o...

The Worldwide Spread of Noninvasive Ventilation; Too Much, Too Little or Just Right?

In the past 20 years, use of noninvasive ventilation (NIV) has increased from rare to highly prevalent in many ICUs around the world. In a single 26-bed French ICU, NIV use for patients with acute respiratory failure (ARF) due to COPD and cardiogenic pulmonary edema (CPE) increased from 20% of ventilator starts in 1994 to nearly 90% in 2001, associated with reductions in health care acquired pn...

Too much, too little, or just right?: untangling endogenous erythropoietin in heart failure.

Anemia is common in patients with heart failure and is associated with adverse outcomes. This observation has now been replicated in chronic systolic heart failure,1 heart failure with preserved ejection fraction,2 and acute decompensated heart failure.3 These data have led to the hypotheses that treating anemia in patients with heart failure may improve outcomes, and therapeutic trials of both...

Fluid resuscitation in septic shock: too much, too little or just right?

[1] describe fl uid resuscitation (FR) in 164 patients with septic shock, concluding that survival was better in patients receiving higher volumes over the fi rst 72 h. I think we should be cautious, however, to conclude from this that more is better. Median FR was 4.0 L over 24 h, and 7.5 L by 72 h relatively small volumes for patients with ongoing shock. FR volumes reported from trials perfor...

The QT interval: too long, too short or just right.