Critical Care Reviews Newsletter

Welcome to the 507th 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.

The highlights of this week's edition are randomised controlled trials on angiography after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest without ST-segment elevation & a comparison of inhaled isoflurane via the anaesthetic conserving device and propofol for sedation of invasively ventilated patients in the ICU; systematic reviews and meta analyses on patient–ventilator asynchrony & awake prone positioning in the management of COVID-19 pneumonia; and observational studies on the risk of thrombocytopenia and thromboembolism after COVID-19 vaccination & six-month quality of life in COVID-19 ICU survivors.

There are also guidelines from the ESC on the diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic heart failure, and jointly from the Japanese Society of Intensive Care Medicine and the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine, on the management of sepsis and septic shock; two paired narrative reviews from The Lancet, on brain injury after cardiac arrest & cardiopulmonary resuscitation in special circumstances; as well as commentaries on COVID-19 in Canada & time to update the ARDS definition.

If you only have time to read one review article this week, try this one on adjunctive treatments for the management of septic shock.

Podcasts

If you haven't yet listened to the Critical Care Reviews Podcast, perhaps try either of the two podcasts which were released this week. The first was the latest episode in our series on the REMAP-CAP adaptive platform trial. Dr Lennie Derde, chair of the International Trial Steering Committee and European Coordinating Investigator, discusses the behind the scenes running of this major international trial. The second was the follow-up podcast to the BaSICS trial result livestream, and featured the trial leads Drs Fernando Zampieri and Alexandre Biasi Cavalcante addressing the questions and comments on the trial which were posted on Twitter.