Critical Care
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Functional Outcomes After Receiving Life-sustaining Therapy in the ICU
Among patients who have spent at least three days in an ICU and required even brief mechanical ventilation and/or vasopressor support, almost half are dead and only one-third return to their baseline at six months. Several factors present on the first day of admission are associated with not returning to baseline status.
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Frailty as a Patient Assessment Tool Prior to Aortic Valve Replacement
Assessment of frailty adds important prognostic information about risk of death and disability following both surgical aortic valve replacement and transcatheter aortic valve replacement. Among the available instruments for assessing frailty, a scale known as the Essential Frailty Toolkit demonstrated the best correlation with outcomes.
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Percutaneous Coronary Interventions in Nonagenarians
Nonagenarians can undergo percutaneous coronary interventions with low in-lab complication rates, but 30-day and one-year mortality is considerably higher than in younger patients.
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Palliative Care-based Intervention Improves Quality of Life in Chronic Heart Failure
Among patients with advanced heart failure, implementation of an interdisciplinary palliative care intervention was associated with improved quality of life.
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Advance Care Planning Must Advance Forward
In a systematic review of 795,909 people in 150 studies, researchers found many Americans have not completed an advance directive.
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Safe Treatment Recommendations for Benzodiazepine Dependence
SYNOPSIS: There are clear, evidence-based treatment withdrawal regimens for benzodiazepine-dependent patients.
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Maternal Mortality, Postpartum Hemorrhage, and Tranexamic Acid: The WOMAN Study
SYNOPSIS: A multicenter study involving patients in 193 countries has shown a decrease in maternal mortality in women with postpartum hemorrhage who were given tranexamic acid once the diagnosis was made.
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Requiem for Beta-blockers Post-Myocardial Infarction?
SYNOPSIS: A propensity score analysis of all hospital survivors of acute myocardial infarction in the United Kingdom from 2007-2013 showed that one-year survival in hospital patients without heart failure or left ventricular dysfunction treated with beta-blockers did not differ from survival in those patients not so treated.
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Early Diuretic Administration Associated With Improved Survival in Acute Heart Failure Patients
SYNOPSIS: Among patients presenting to the ED with acute heart failure, those who received the first dose of intravenous furosemide within 60 minutes of arrival demonstrated lower in-hospital mortality compared to those receiving the first dose after 60 minutes.
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Cefazolin Leads to Better Outcomes for Methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia Than Nafcillin or Oxacillin
SYNOPSIS: A retrospective study that included patients from 119 Veterans Affairs hospitals found lower mortality and a similar recurrence rate for methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia treated with cefazolin compared to nafcillin and oxacillin.