BACKGROUND In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the prognosis for patients who have survived an episode of acute hypercapnic respiratory failure due to an exacerbation is poor. Despite being shown to improve survival and quality-of-life in stable patients with chronic hypercapnic respiratory failure, long-term noninvasive ventilation is controversial in unstable patients with frequent exac...

Hypercapnic respiratory failure is common in advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and is usually treated by nasal ventilation. Not all patients requiring such ventilation can tolerate it, with anxiety and phobia influencing their reaction, along with treatment failure. We report the case histories of six patients with hypercapnic respiratory failure who were at risk of death due to re...

adequately ventilate), or both hypoxic and hypercapnic. In addition, respiratory failure can be caused by an inability to protect the airway. Alterations in the normal physiology and anatomy of the respiratory system can lead to respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation. Anatomic alterations causing airway obstruction, such as tumors, edema, direct or indirect trauma, burns, or other...

of acute hypercapnic respiratory failure in adults A Craig Davidson, Stephen Banham, Mark Elliott, Daniel Kennedy, Colin Gelder, Alastair Glossop, Alistair Colin Church, Ben Creagh-Brown, James William Dodd, Tim Felton, Bernard Foëx, Leigh Mansfield, Lynn McDonnell, Robert Parker, Caroline Marie Patterson, Milind Sovani, Lynn Thomas, BTS Standards of Care Committee Member, British Thoracic Soci...

INTRODUCTION To diagnose and assess chronic respiratory failure in stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) the measurement of arterial blood gases (ABG) is required. It has been suggested that ABG be determined for this purpose when FEV1 ranges between 50% and 30% predicted, but these thresholds are not evidence-based. OBJECTIVE To identify the post-bronchodilator (BD) FEV₁ and ar...

BACKGROUND The ventilatory capacity of the respiratory neuromuscular system can be studied with the hypercapnia test. OBJECTIVE To determine whether decreased response to the hypercapnia test is associated with failure to pass a spontaneous breathing trial (SBT) or extubation failure. METHODS We studied 103 intubated patients ready for SBT. We used a hypercapnia test in which we approximate...

Sleep disturbance related symptoms are common in patients with long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT). Essentially, there were only few previous reports about the sleep architecture in patients with respiratory disease, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This study aims to clarify the objective sleep state and the elements that affect sleep architecture in Chronic Respiratory Failur...