Active clinical trials for "Thoracic Injuries"

To determine test performance of transesophageal echocardiography performed by emergency physician ultrasound for the identification of blunt traumatic aortic injury in chest trauma.

The main study objective is to evaluate the long-term outcome in a prospective follow-up visit of patients who underwent hardware removal after surgical stabilization of rib fractures (SSRF) after a blunt chest trauma .

Continuous paravertebral analgesia and erector spinae plane blockade (ESP) are accepted techniques at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) for the management of thoracic pain following surgery and trauma. Recently, an increasing number of erector spinae plane blocks are being performed as it has been demonstrated in our institution and via case reports that they provide clinical effectiveness, but may have a better side-effect profile than the paravertebral nerve block. However, the relative efficacy of ESP and continuous paravertebral analgesia for patients with rib fractures remains to be established. This study will include 60 consecutive patients presenting to the UPMC Presbyterian Acute Interventional Perioperative Pain Service suffering from unilateral rib fractures and will be randomized to receive either nerve blocks via continuous paravertebral infusion or via erector spinae plane infusion. In addition, to treat breakthrough pain, the patients in both arms will receive multimodal adjunctive therapy per routine. Bupivicaine and ropivicaine are FDA approved for use in nerve block catheters. The primary outcome will be total opioid consumption in the first 3 days of nerve block. Secondary outcomes include highest visual analog pain score (VAS) with deep breathing and at rest, adverse events, and total number of nerve blocks. Other data points include time to readiness for discharge, and length of hospital stay.

The purpose of this study is to use the Duracore splinting device to measure lung capacities of patients with rib fractures in control and experimental groups to determine if lung capacities improve with the splint.

Blunt chest trauma comprises over 10% of all trauma patients presenting to emergency departments worldwide and is the most frequent injury in polytrauma patients. It is associated with high risk (>10%) of pulmonary complications such as pneumonia. Pillars of treatment are adequate pain relief, respiratory function exercises and rapid mobilisation through physiotherapy. Inadequate pain control can result in restricted ventilatory function and in reduced mobility, both resulting in a higher risk of particularly pulmonary complications. Virtual Reality (VR) might be an easy to use, individualized, and harmless technique that can facilitate pulmonary recovery and aid in the prevention of complications through reducing pain and promoting exercising. The investigators hypothesize that VR improves respiratory function and mobilisation in the post-acute phase of blunt chest trauma by distracting patients from pain and stress, and by stimulating pulmonary and physical exercise.

Chest trauma remains an issue for health services for both severe and apparently mild trauma management. Severe chest trauma is associated with high mortality and is liable for 25% of mortality in multiple traumas. Moreover, mild trauma is also associated with significant morbidity, especially in patients with preexisting conditions. Thus, whatever the severity, a fast-acting strategy must be organized. In order to improve the prognosis of patients with severe chest trauma, early and continuous application of non-invasive mechanical ventilation (NIV) can indeed reduce the need for intubation and shorten intensive care unit length-of-stay. Among different mechanisms, the early use of positive end-expiratory pressure after chest trauma, when feasible, seems mandatory to optimize oxygenation and improve clinical outcomes. Indeed, interventions aimed at preventing ARDS after chest trauma carry the greatest potential to reduce the substantial morbidity, mortality, and resource utilization associated with this syndrome.

Chest trauma (CT) patients with 3 or more ribs fractures with or without pleuropulmonary injury are an indicator of severity. Chest physiotherapy (CP) and analgesia is the first line treatment in these patients. The aim study is to evaluate the effect of positive expiratory pressure (PEP) breathing compared to the incentive spirometry in terms of pain control in the recent phase of CT.

Rib fractures are frequent injuries found approximately in 10% severe trauma patient. Rib fractures were correlated in many studies with a higher morbidity and mortality. This impaired outcome is mainly due to pulmonary complications consequences including especially pulmonary contusions. Frequently, patients present difficulty deep breathing and coughing. These adverse effects can lead to the development of atelectasis, hypoxia, and respiratory failure with mechanic ventilation recourse. Effective pain management may prevent these complications and reduce the likelihood of developing chronic pain. A multi-modal analgesia regimen is widely employed combining regional and systemic analgesia. Epidural analgesia is considered by many authors to be the gold standard of pain relief although many side-effects are frequently describe including hypotension, urinary retention nausea and vomiting. Paravertebral nerve blockade is an adequate alternative that provide similar quality of analgesia with lower incidence of complication. However, the failure rate associates with PVB is about 13% and it may be associated with hypotension (4.6%), accidental vascular puncture (3.8%), accidental pleural puncture (1.1%) and rarely pneumothorax (0.5%). Recently, a description of the intercostal paraspinal nerve block. This technic was performed for patients undergoing thoracic surgery without complications.More recently, a description of a new approach to provide thoracic analgesia named the Posterior Paramedian subchoroidal (PoPS) block. The authors consider this technique provide an analgesia of the anterior and the posterior branch of adjacent thoracic nerves. The investigators propose to investigate the effect of Posterior exothoracic fascial block.

This study will evaluate the effect of single transplantation of HuCNS-SC cells into the thoracic spinal cord of patients with sub-acute spinal cord injury.

Crossover randomized controlled double blinded trial : The primary endpoint is the duration of Non Invasive Ventilation (NIV) session (minutes) with dexmedetomidine (DEX) or placebo. Secondary endpoints will be the sedation level as assessed by the Richmond Agitation Sedation Scale (RASS), the number of interventions to allow the completion of NIV session, the pain intensity level as assessed by visual analogue scale, the morphine and ketamine consumption during NIV sessions, the comparison of blood gas measurements before and after NIV sessions, the reproducibility of NIV cycles. The side effects of DEX will be notified.