#LIVES2021 Begins: Intensive Care is All About the Team ESICM President Maurizio Cecconi, President-Elect Elie Azoulay and Congress Chair Armand Girbes officially opened the LIVES Digital 2021 Congress with a welcome address, an update on ESICM’s activities and initiatives and an overview of the Congress programme.  The COVID-19 crisis has put intensive care medicine at the heart of all concerns within the medical community on a governmental and state level...

Medical News & Perspectives October 21, 2021 The Flawed Science of Antibody Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Immunity Jennifer Abbasi JAMA. Published online October 21, 2021. doi:10.1001/jama.2021.18919 Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, developers designed SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests to detect whether people had been infected. Some experts thought the blood tests eventually would help to ease lockdowns. One idea was that those with antibodies likely would...

Sex, Illness Severity and Mortality in ICU Patients Women account for only about 35-45% of patients in the ICU. This is surprising since half of the world’s population are women. This highlights a very pertinent question: do men and women have equitable access to the ICU? There have been several clinical studies that have tried to determine sex differences in illness severity and survival. However, there have been no consistent results. Some studies show no diff...

Application of Artificial Intelligence in the ICU Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise in critical care. Vast amounts of data are regularly collected in intensive care units, making ICUs the perfect environment for deploying machine-learning techniques. AI in ICUs can have several applications. For example, when determining the short and long-term outcomes of different interventions, a well-designed ICU system could provide significant support in the...

Association of Volume of Sepsis Cases and Mortality Sepsis is a leading cause of death worldwide and is also associated with a high burden of patient mortality.  This burden is expected to increase as populations age. Patients with sepsis typically require high-cost interventions in ICUs. Even with urgent treatment, the probability of death still remains high. However, ICUs that have more experience treating such patients may be associated with lower mortality...

Safe Liberation During Weaning from VV-ECMO The use of venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VV-ECMO) in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) has increased substantially over the last few years. However, conclusive evidence supporting its use is still lacking, and mortality of patients treated with VV-ECMO for ARDS is still high. Optimal strategies of mechanical ventilation (MV) during VV-ECMO have been reported, but there is...

Intubation Timing and COVID-19 ARDS Outcomes COVID-19 associated ARDS is associated with high mortality risk. Many patients with COVID-19 have been admitted with pneumonia and arterial hypoxaemia, increased work of breathing or impending fatigue. It is a common clinical practice to intubate patients with severe hypoxaemia. However, during the pandemic, there was a high demand for ICU beds. Therefore, some experts recommended a more conservative approach and promote...

Prone Positioning and Survival in Mechanically Ventilated COVID-19 Patients Coronavirus disease is still fairly new for clinicians who are constantly searching for therapies for patients with respiratory failure from COVID-19. Early implementation of prone positioning ventilation has been shown to improve survival in patients with ARDS. However, data on the effect of probing on survival in patients with COVID-19 is still scarce. The American Thoracic Society, Eu...

ECMO for COVID-19 Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been used in patients with COVID-19 who develop severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ECMO has previously been used in other infectious outbreaks, including the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak. The Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation (ELSO), the World Health Organization and the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) guidel...

Impact of Multimorbidity on Long-Term Outcomes After ICU Discharge Critical care admissions continue to increase year after year. There is also increasing evidence that demonstrates discharge from critical care as the start of a challenging process for both patients and caregivers, with many survivors going through physical, social, cognitive, and emotional problems in the years following discharge. It is clinically proven that people who survive critical i...