The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of using Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score as the predictors of length of stay (LOS) in various surgical intensive care units (ICUs) and to test the hypothesis that the significance of scoring for predicting LOS is greater in specialized surgical ICUs. We scor...

BACKGROUND Chromogranin A (CgA) in plasma (P-CgA), a neuroendocrine marker of sympathetic stress, has been shown to predict mortality in medical intensive care. We hypothesized that the magnitude of CgA release would reflect stress load, and thereby injury severity in burn intensive care patients. METHODS Fifty-one consecutive patients with a burn area exceeding 10% were included. P-CgA was m...

BACKGROUND Because the arterial/alveolar oxygen tension ratio (a/APO2) is relatively constant throughout the entire range of fractional inspired oxygen concentration (FiO2), its use in determining the prognosis of acute pulmonary embolism (APE) was investigated. METHODS AND RESULTS This study retrospectively assessed 202 consecutive patients with APE confirmed by computed tomography or high p...

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of enoxaparin (ENO) and fondaparinux (FPX) on postoperative plasma D-dimer levels and risk factors associated with postoperative venous thromboembolism (VTE) and pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) in patients with gynecologic cancer. For this study, 434 patients with gynecologic cancer were recruited and a surgical treatment strategy was...

Objectives: Methotrexate is commonly used in the treatment of ectopic pregnancy. Outcomes with a suboptimal drop in human chorionic gonadotrophic (hCG) level are unknown. This study aimed to determine the optimal cutoff value for hCG drop in detecting treatment success, to investigate the predictors of success, and to evaluate outcome following a single dose of methotrexate as treatment of ecto...