Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are at high risk for developing critical illness and for admission to intensive care units (ICU). 'Critically ill CKD patients' frequently develop an acute worsening of renal function (i.e. acute-on-chronic, AoC) that contributes to long-term kidney dysfunction, potentially leading to end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). An integrated multidisciplinary eff...

Citation: Tembo AC. Phenomenological Inquiry as a Methodology for Investigating the Lived Experience of Being Critically Ill in Intensive Care. J Intensive & Crit Care 2016, 2:1. In the Cartesian driven high tech environment of ICU were patients are objectified and reduced to anatomical and biochemical entities, phenomenological inquiry can bring a touch of humanness and holism to the care of c...

Critically ill patients experience oxidative stress. The most seriously ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) have increased mediators of oxidant stress and greater incidence of multi-organ failure compared to less seriously ill patients. Historically, several studies had documented that such stressed patients also have low plasma levels of key nutrients involved in antioxidant defence ...

BACKGROUND Nutritional support is an important link between the response to injury and recovery in critical illness. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to evaluate energy and substrate metabolism in septic and nonseptic critically ill patients in the resting state and during the administration of standardized total parenteral nutrition. DESIGN This was a prospective, clinical cohort study of 25 consecu...

BACKGROUND Frequently, critically ill patients suffer from intraabdominal pathology, such as sepsis or ischemia, either as a cause of a critical illness or as a complication from another illness requiring an intensive care unit (ICU) admission. These complications are associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality (between 50% to 100%). The diagnosis of these problems can be difficult in...

BACKGROUND In a prospective observational study, we examined the temporal relationships between serum erythropoietin (EPO) levels, haemoglobin concentration and the inflammatory response in critically ill patients with and without acute renal failure (ARF). PATIENTS AND METHOD Twenty-five critically ill patients, from general and cardiac intensive care units (ICUs) in a university hospital, w...

BACKGROUND In critically ill patients, induction with etomidate is hypothesized to be associated with an increased risk of mortality. Previous randomized studies suggest a modest trend toward an increased risk of death among etomidate recipients; however, this relationship has not been measured with great statistical precision. We aimed to test whether etomidate is associated with risk of hospi...

OBJECTIVE The acute physiology, age and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) II score and other related scores have been used for evaluation of illness severity in the intensive care unit (ICU), but there is still a need for real-time and sensitive prognostic biomarkers. Recently, alarmins from damaged tissues have been reported as alarm-signaling molecules. Although ATP is a member of the alarmi...

BACKGROUND Elevated lactate levels in critically ill patients are most often thought to be indicative of relative tissue hypoxia or type A lactic acidosis. Shock, severe anemia, and thromboembolic events can all cause elevated lactate due to tissue hypoperfusion, as well as the mitochondrial dysfunction thought to occur in sepsis and other critically ill states. Malignancy can also lead to elev...

Critically ill patients frequently experience poor sleep, characterized by frequent disruptions, loss of circadian rhythms, and a paucity of time spent in restorative sleep stages. Factors that are associated with sleep disruption in the intensive care unit (ICU) include patient-ventilator dysynchrony, medications, patient care interactions, and environmental noise and light. As the field of cr...