Prolonged stay in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) can cause muscle weakness, physical deconditioning, recurrent symptoms, mood alterations and poor quality of life. Physiotherapy is probably the only treatment likely to increase in the short- and long-term care of the patients admitted to these units. Recovery of physical and respiratory functions, coming off mechanical ventilation, prevention of the...

* Corresponding author at: Omid Moradi Moghaddam, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Rasoul-Akram Medical Center Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. Tel: +98-9391244560, Fax: +98-2166509059, E-mail: moradimoghadam@yahoo. com DOI: 10.5812/kowsar.22287523.2291 Copyright c 2011, ISRAPM, Published by Kowsar M. P. Co All rights reserved. Probiotics in Critically Ill Pat...

www.chestjournal.org CHEST / 137 / 1 / JANUARY, 2010 185 C about the risk of bleeding in critically ill patients are common. This apprehension may stem from a sense of responsibility for bleeding following procedures or anticoagulant therapy, or perhaps the fact that hemorrhage is often visible externa lly. In addition, the clinical laboratory may raise awareness by offering tests that clinicia...

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...

Hypernatremia is common in intensive care units. It has detrimental effects on various physiologic functions and was shown to be an independent risk factor for increased mortality in critically ill patients. Mechanisms of hypernatremia include sodium gain and/or loss of free water and can be discriminated by clinical assessment and urine electrolyte analysis. Because many critically ill patient...