Management of thrombocytopenia in the ICU (pregnancy excluded)

Thrombocytopenia is a very frequent disorder in the intensive care unit. Many etiologies should be searched, and therapeutic approaches differ according to these different causes. However, no guideline exists regarding optimum practices for these situations in critically ill patients. We present recommendations for the management of thrombocytopenia in intensive care unit, excluding pregnancy, developed by an expert group of the French-Language Society of Intensive Care (Société de Réanimation...

Management by the intensivist of gastrointestinal bleeding in adults and children

Intensivists are regularly confronted with the question of gastrointestinal bleeding. To date, the latest international recommendations regarding prevention and treatment for gastrointestinal bleeding lack a specific approach to the critically ill patients. We present recommendations for management by the intensivist of gastrointestinal bleeding in adults and children, developed with the GRADE system by an experts group of the French-Language Society of Intensive Care (Société de Réanimation de...

PELOD-2: an update of the PEdiatric logistic organ dysfunction score

CONCLUSION: We developed and validated the PEdiatric Logistic Organ Dysfunction-2 score, which allows assessment of the severity of cases of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome in the PICU with a continuous scale. The PEdiatric Logistic Organ Dysfunction-2 score now includes mean arterial pressure and lactatemia in the cardiovascular dysfunction and does not include hepatic dysfunction. The score will be in the public domain, which means that it can be freely used in clinical trials.

French law related to patient's rights and end of life: pediatric intensive care unit's health professionals' opinions

CONCLUSION: This study is the first to show that caregivers of French PICUs have good knowledge of the French law concerning the end of life. Yet, there is still confusion about the limits of practice during the end-of-life period.

New recommendations for the management of children after minor head trauma

Minor head trauma is a common cause for pediatric emergency department visits. In 2009, the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) published a clinical prediction rule for identifying children at very low risk of clinically important traumatic brain injuries (ciTBI) and for reducing CT use because of malignancy induced by ionizing radiation. The prediction rule for ciTBI was derived and validated on 42,412 children in a prospective cohort study. The Société Française de...

Extracorporeal life support for patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome: report of a Consensus Conference

The influenza H1N1 epidemics in 2009 led a substantial number of people to develop severe acute respiratory distress syndrome and refractory hypoxemia. In these patients, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation was used as rescue oxygenation therapy. Several randomized clinical trials and observational studies suggested that extracorporeal membrane oxygenation associated with protective mechanical ventilation could improve outcome, but its efficacy remains uncertain. Organized by the Société de...

Care organization at French pediatric emergency department

The number of children admitted to paediatric emergencies is increasing steadily, and is responsible for an altered quality in the patients' reception and some major perturbations in the care organization. In this context, the primary care physicians play a major role in explaining their patients "how to use" the paediatric emergency department (priority in case of vital emergency, periods with lot of admissions and increased waiting time ...). Everything must be done to find an altemative to...

Daily estimation of the severity of organ dysfunctions in critically ill children by using the PELOD-2 score

CONCLUSION: This study suggests that the progression of the severity of organ dysfunctions can be evaluated by measuring the dPELOD-2 score during a set of 7 days in PICU, providing useful information on outcome in critically ill children. Its external validation would be useful.

Acute kidney injury in the perioperative period and in intensive care units (excluding renal replacement therapies)

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a syndrome that has progressed a great deal over the last 20 years. The decrease in urine output and the increase in classical renal biomarkers, such as blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine, have largely been used as surrogate markers for decreased glomerular filtration rate (GFR), which defines AKI. However, using such markers of GFR as criteria for diagnosing AKI has several limits including the difficult diagnosis of non-organic AKI, also called "functional...