PURPOSE OF REVIEW Patients who experience severe trauma are at increased risk for the development of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The management strategies used to treat respiratory failure in this patient population should be comprehensive. Current trends in the management of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome consist of maintaining acceptab...

Since around 1950, physiological dead space - the difference between arterial and mixed expired pCO2 (partial pressure of carbon dioxide) divided by the arterial pCO2 - has been a useful clinical parameter of pulmonary gas exchange. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Niklason and colleagues remind us that physiological dead space, while easily measured, consolidates potentially very comple...

Objective: To evaluate wound healing activity of ethanolic extract of Jasminum grandiflorum Linn. (J. grandiflorum) flowers in diabetic rats. Materials and Methods: Streptozotocin-induced diabetic Wistar albino rats were divided into six groups (n=6).Three groups – diabetic control, positive control (that received Glibenclamide) and treatment (that received J. grandiflorum Linn. Flower extract...

Venous shunt in cardiopulmonary physiology means that a fraction of the total cardiac output from the right side of the heart does not take part in gas exchange in the lungs and so passes unchanged into the arterial circulation (Berggren, 1942; Riley and Cournand, 1951; and Mcllroy, 1965). Since the shunted blood is mixed venous blood, the terms venous admixture, right-to-left shunt, and venous...

In this issue of RESPIRATORY CARE, Kallet et al1 describe the prognostic value of sequential dead-space measurements in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The simple calculation using arterial and mixed expired partial pressures of carbon dioxide (the Enghoff modification of the Bohr dead-space equation: physiologic dead-space volume divided by tidal volume [VD/VT]) is mo...