Critical Care Reviews Newsletter

Welcome to the 512th 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 highlight of this week's edition is the VAM-IHCA randomised controlled trial, investigating the combination of vasopressin and methylprednisolone for in-hospital cardiac arrest, which we had the privilege of hosting the results presentation of a few nights ago. The full edited video and audio recordings of the livestream are available on the CCR website.

There are also randomised controlled trials on individualised glucose control in critically-ill patients & high dose coupled plasma filtration and adsorption in septic shock patients. On Saturday, the 2021 iteration of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines were released. There are also great narrative reviews on artificial liver support systems & hemodynamic instability during acute kidney injury and acute renal replacement therapy. If you only have time to read one narrative review article, try this paper on blood purification in sepsis and systemic inflammation.

In other news, Merck issued a press release this week describing how the antiviral molnupiravir reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by approximately 50% compared to placebo for patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 in an interim analysis of a phase 3 study.

Critical Care Reviews Blog

Finally, this week coming we start the Critical Care Reviews Blog, exploring critical care trials in detail, seeking to answer why trials found the results they did. We start with the REST trial, investigating ultra-low tidal volume ventilation facilitated by extra-corporeal carbon dioxide removal in patients with acute hypoxaemic respiratory failure.