Critical Care Reviews Newsletter

Welcome to the 515th 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 publication of the COVID STEROID 2 Trial, comparing 12 mg with 6 mg of dexamethasone in patients with severe COVID-19 and hypoxia. We held a livestream of the results presentation, with the JAMA paper being simultaneosuly published during the session. It's a trial result which requires a nuanced discussion and careful interpretation. If you haven't yet seen the livestream, the edited recording is now available on the website, including the audio files for those who prefer to listen in podcast form.

The remaining highlights of the newsletter include the CAPITAL CHILL randomised controlled trial, comparing moderate hypothermia (target 31 °C) with mild hypothermia (target 34 °C) in adults with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. There are also systematic reviews & meta analyses on gastric residual volume monitoring & interventions to enable communication for adult patients requiring an artificial airway with or without mechanical ventilator support; guidelines on transfusion strategies in bleeding critically ill adults & paediatric acute liver failure; as well as narrative reviews on COVID-19 pneumonia, EEG monitoring in the ICU & the effect of opioids on gastrointestinal function in the ICU

If you only have time to read one review article this week, try this one on clinical use of tranexamic acid: evidences and controversies.

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Over the past year Critical Care Reviews has massively increased its content output, with the addition of major trial result livestreams and a blog, plus the restoration of the podcast. This is on top of our existing resources, including this newsletter, the website (redesigned this year), meeting (entirely free to view this year) and book (writing is in progress). Our aim is to promote open access to scientific advancements in critical care for the benefit of all. None of our content is paywalled, but the more content we create and share the more expensive it is for us to do so. If you find our work useful and are able to support it, please consider doing so.