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Involving family members in ICU rounds improved satisfaction in some areas, such as physician communication and decision-making support, but failed to improve overall family satisfaction.
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In a hospital with high ICU bed occupancy, delays in transferring critically ill patients from the emergency department or general wards to the ICU were associated with increased mortality in comparison with immediate transfer to an ICU bed, and this increased mortality was incrementally greater with increasing delay.
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Current guidelines recommend hypothermia for comatose survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in whom return of circulation has been achieved.
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Noroviruses are the major single cause of gastroenteritis outbreaks throughout the world and the leading cause of foodborne disease in the United States.
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Therapeutic hypothermia does not result in improved outcomes in patients with traumatic brain injury.
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This study of outcomes among more than 50,000 elderly Medicare beneficiaries found that activities of daily living and mobility had deteriorated substantially more among those who had been hospitalized the previous year, and that only 27% of those who had received mechanical ventilation were alive 1 year after hospitalization.
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Bacterial transmission to the IV stopcock set was documented in 19/164 cases (11.5%); 47% of these cases were of provider origin and linked to hands of anesthesia providers.
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Patients presenting with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) should be administered dual anti-platelet therapy with aspirin and a thienopyridine, such as clopidogrel. However, some patients are subsequently found to have left main (LM) or multivessel disease (MVD) and require coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.
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Thrombosis of prosthetic heart valves is one of the most feared complications of heart-valve replacement.
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Uric acid as a weak organic acid (pka 5.8) is poorly soluble at physiological pH. It presence in serum is derived both from diet and endogenous biosynthesis, and it is excreted primarily by renal (75%) mechanisms under normal circumstances.