Active clinical trials for "Critical Illness"

The goal of this clinical trial is to evaluate nutrition administration in the time around the tracheostomy in patients with breathing tubes. The main questions it aims to answer are: Will continuing nutrition up to the time of surgery (tracheostomy) decrease nutrition interruptions, thereby increasing food intake? Does continuing nutrition up to the time of surgery increase instances of food going into the lungs or lung infections? Researchers will compare patients who have nutrition withheld 6 hours prior to surgery versus those who receive nutrition up until the time of surgery to see if there are differences in food intake, instances of food entering the lungs or lung infections.

ICU-acquired weakness represents a common and often devastating disease process which affects greater than 50% of critically ill patients. This pathogenesis of this acquired disease is multifactorial and results in variable severity, ranging from mild, transient to severe, permanent dysfunction of peripheral nerves in additional to muscle. In affected patients, weakness may persist for months to years after the acute phase of their illness, and has been implicated as a major contributor to decreased functional status and quality of life. Muscle ultrasound has been validated for assessment of muscle size as well as diagnosis of myopathic and neuropathic changes in patients with other known neuromuscular diseases. The use of muscle ultrasound or other imaging modalities for diagnosis or monitoring of ICU-acquired weakness has not been studied, although a single study using muscle ultrasound has shown significant change in muscle size in ICU patients receiving high dose corticosteroids and a prolonged course of paralytic agents. The investigators plan to use multiple modalities to examine skeletal muscle catabolism, function, and structure in patients during critical illness and recovery. The investigators will combine physical exam, hand grip dynamometry, electrophysiologic studies, serum biomarkers, muscle biopsies, and muscle ultrasound to assess a group of critically ill patients during their hospital stay. The investigators will obtain additional data, including neuropsychiatric assessments, severity of illness scores, administration of potentially harmful medications, and pertinent daily laboratory data. This study will last approximately 12 months.

The aim of this study is to test the effect of 1week of extracorporeal diaphragm pacing (EDP) combined either with or without tilt table verticalization (TTV) on diaphragm function in patients with mechanical ventilation compared to conventional physiotherapy (CPT).

The use of extracorporeal blood purification therapies (EBPT) is becoming increasingly widespread worldwide in everyday clinical practice, particularly in the critical care setting. Nonetheless, most of the clinical trials aimed at exploring the effect of EBPT on patients' long-term outcomes have failed to demonstrate consistent results regarding 28 day- or hospital- mortality rates. The aim of this observational prospective registry is to evaluate if there is a cluster of critically ill patients that mostly benefits from extracorporeal blood purification therapies with different EBPTs.

A vast majority of children admitted to paediatric intensive care (PICU) present with faltering growth during their admission. Muscle mass loss is an early, intense and frequent phenomenon in this setting, which is associated with impaired outcomes. Recent international guidelines recommend monitoring both nutritional status and muscle mass throughout hospital stay. Recent studies have used quadriceps femoris (QF) measurements as a surrogate for lean mass assessment, and monitored them with bedside ultrasound (QF thickness and QF cross sectional area). However, ultrasound cross sectional area inter-operator reproducibility has not been validated so far, and none of these ultrasound measurements has been validated against their gold standard i.e. magnetic resonance imaging measurements. This validation process should be conducted to allow interpreting ultrasound muscle measurements, prior to the implementation of ultrasound measurments into clinical practice. We hypothesise that ultrasound measurements of QF thickness and cross sectional area are reliable compared to the magnetic resonance imaging gold standard, and that QF cross sectional area has a reliable inter-operator reproducibility.

Dysphagia and the intensive care unit-acquired weakness (ICU-AW) are common and outcome-relevant neuromuscular complications in critically ill patients, especially after prolonged mechanical ventilation, sepsis and multi-organ failure. However, the impact of these two complications on the clinical course of critically ill patients needs further investigation. Furthermore, the standard diagnostic procedure to detect and grade the acquired dysphagia using the fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES) and the Medical Research Council sum score (MRC-ss) to detect ICU-AW are time-consuming and strongly dependent on patient compliance. An early and easy-to-use detection of these neuromuscular complications is currently difficult to be achieved in this patient population. Neuromuscular ultrasound (NMUS) and the measurement of neuromuscular damage blood biomarkers became increasingly interesting for clinical researchers in the recent years due to their broad availability and their simple and non-invasive application. However, the value of these new diagnostic tests to evaluate dysphagia and ICU-AW needs to be verified.

The National Academy of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health have called for urgent action to improve the care delivered to the nearly 1,000,000 older Americans who die in intensive care units (ICUs) annually, or survive with substantial impairments. These patients often die with distressing symptoms and may receive more invasive, life-prolonging treatment than they would choose for themselves. Moreover, their family members acting as surrogate decision makers often experience lasting psychological distress from the ICU experience. The investigators will conduct a randomized trial among 500 patients and 750 surrogates and up to 1250 clinicians to determine whether early integration of specialty palliative care with standard critical care can improve outcomes for critically ill older patients at high risk of death or severe functional impairments and their family members.

The purpose of this study is to determine if exercising with a music video program will improve physical functions of patients who have been discharged from an Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

Modern intensive care enables patients to survive insults that in the past would have been supralethal. Nonetheless, increased number of survivors suffer from failed functional outcomes associated with prolonged muscle weakness and fatiguability. Whilst alterations of skeletal muscle biology that occur during critical illness slowly disappear over the period of months, muscle weakness remains. Recent pilot studies have shown that muscle weakness is associated with loss and alteration of satellite skeletal muscle cells, which are supposed to proliferate and repair damaged muscle tissue. The pathogenesis of this phenomenon has not been fully understood. In this grant project, we will study function and structure of satellite cells and their organelles (particularly mitochondria) using both classical bioenergetics and advanced microscopic techniques. Satellite cells will be isolated from biopsies taken from critically ill patients with developed muscle weakness in the acute and protracted phase of a disease and after 6 months. In time points, an ultrasound examination of muscle mass will be performed, and metabolism will be assessed using insulin clamps. In an in vitro experiments, we will test also effect of nutritional and anabolic factors and drugs, commonly used in ICU, on satellite cells. In a control branch, cells will be isolated from skeletal muscle of volunteers undergoing elective hip replacement surgery. Results of this study could significantly contribute to understanding of mechanisms leading to ICU acquired muscle weakness and to identify therapeutic strategy in future.

Although new techniques like extracorporeal blood purification have lately emerged, septic patients still have very high hospital mortality rates. Sepsis can be induced by either viremia, bacteriemia or in some cases both. Many studies have reported the effectiveness of different hemadsorbers, but patient sample sizes have been inadequate for definitive conclusions. Secondly, there are still no clear inclusion criteria as well as criteria for when to cease hemadsorption mostly due to immune dysregulation or cascade coagulation disorders. The aim of this observational prospective registry is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seraph® 100 Microbind® Affinity Blood Filter (Seraph 100) in the treatment of septic ICU patients and to evaluate which cluster of these patients should benefit most with this therapy.