Critical Care Reviews Newsletter

Welcome to the 511th Critical Care Reviews Newsletter, bringing you the best critical care research and open access articles from across the medical literature over the past seven days. It's a small newsletter this week, as I've been focused on the upcoming VAM-IHCA trial result livestream.

The highlights of this week's edition are randomised controlled trials on the effect of probiotics on incident ventilator-associated pneumonia & perioperative goal-directed therapy in high-risk abdominal surgery; systematic reviews and meta analyses on long-term sequelae of critical illness in sepsis, trauma and burns & antibody and cellular therapies for treatment of covid-19; and an observational study on frailty and long-term outcomes in patients with sepsis who are over 80 years old. There are also guidelines on resuscitation in critically ill cancer patients & the intraoperative management of adult patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation; narrative reviews on renal replacement techniques in septic shock, life-threatening skin conditions, & rational fluid resuscitation in sepsis; and a commentary on predicting coma trajectories.

If you only have time to read one review article this week, try this one on the pathophysiology of the acute respiratory distress syndrome, part of a series from Critical Care Clinics.

VAM-IHCA Trial Results Livestream

On Wednesday night (Thursday morning in the Pacific and East Asia), Profs Lars Wiuff Andersen and Asger Grenfeldt will present the results of the VAM-IHCA trial, investigating vasopressin and methylprednisolone for in-hospital cardiac arrest. This is the first trial to follow from the VSE trial, which reported improved survival with good neurological outcomes with a combination of intra-arrest vasopressin, adrenaline and methylprednisolone, followed if necessary, by hydrocortisone if post-resuscitation shock persisted. The chief investigator for the VSE trial, Prof Spyros Mentzelopoulos, will deliver the independent editorial on the VAM-IHCA trial. This will be followed by an international panel of cardiac arrest experts discussing the implications of this trial. Your local timings for this free livestream are listed on the livestream webpage.