The use or misuse of statins in critically ill patients recently attracted the attention of intensive care clinicians. Indeed, statins are probably the most common chronic treatment before critical illness and some recent experimental and clinical data demonstrated their beneficial effects during sepsis, acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), or after aneurismal sub...

Nutrition is an integral component of general care for critically ill patients, and numerous randomized trials have addressed research questions related to the optimal feeding route, formulation, dose, and timing of initiation. The mission of the free website www.criticalcarenutrition.com is 'to improve the practice of nutrition support in the critical care setting through knowledge translation...

Background Magnesium (Mg) is essential for life and plays a crucial role in several biochemical and physiological processes in the human body. Hypomagnesemia is common in all hospitalized patients, especially in critically ill patients with coexisting electrolyte abnormalities. Hypomagnesemia may cause severe and potential fatal complications if not timely diagnosed and properly treated, and as...

Standard analytical tools employed for quality assessment such as root cause analysis are simply inadequate. Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is a systematic and comprehensive methodology widely applied in other industries to evaluate undesirable outcomes such as risk, and PRA may be a promising tool for assessment of adverse events in the ICU.2–5 PRA entails constructing the chronology of a...

This book, with 16 authors from around the world, discusses how critically ill patients respond to some of the drugs they are given. Its aim is to give knowledge and understanding of the underlying principles of pharmacology as applied to the critically ill. The authors provide insight into why there may be differences between the expected response to a drug, or a class of drug, between critica...