Should We Be Using the Poisoning Severity Score?

Fluoride varnishes: should we be using them?

Fluoride varnishes are fast becoming the standard of care as topical fluoride treatments. Fluoride varnishes still await approval from the FDA for use as caries preventive agents. In the meantime, their use for such purposes is considered "off-label." This article highlights the efficacy of fluoride varnishes as caries preventive agents and introduces some of the commercially available fluoride...

Should the New Injury Severity Score replace the Injury Severity Score in the Trauma and Injury Severity Score?

BACKGROUND This study was performed to compare the efficacies of Injury Severity Score (ISS) and New Injury Severity Score (NISS), and to investigate whether replacing ISS with NISS in Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) changes the predictive power for mortality. METHODS We retrospectively analyzed 550 patients aged over 16 years seen in our center over a period of four years who had in...

Major trauma and the injury severity score--where should we set the bar?

Major trauma is commonly defined using an Injury Severity Score (ISS) threshold of 15. Since this threshold was formulated, there have been significant developments in both the Abbreviated Injury Scale underlying the ISS, and trauma management techniques, both in the preventive and acute-care phases of trauma management. This study assesses whether this ISS threshold is appropriate when evaluat...

Should we all be vegetarians?

Quantifying the severity of acute lung injury using dead-space ventilation: should the lung injury score be updated?

During the past decade of research on acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) there has been heightened interest in measuring physiologic dead-space fraction (VD/VT). Since ARDS first was described 44 years ago, the primary focus on gas exchange abnormalities concerned oxygenation. In fact, until the publication in 2002 by Nuckton et al,1 pulmonary dead-space vent...