Abstract
The differential diagnosis of prolonged ICU stays includes intrinsic patient and admitting diagnostic characteristics, things that happen during the course of critical illness, and organizational failures. Among these, existing (albeit fragmentary) data suggest that the development of new cascading problems in the ICU is the most common experience of patients with prolonged ICU stays. Such patients with persistent critical illness have been defined as those patients whose “reason for being in ICU is now more related to their ongoing critical illness than their original reason for admission to the ICU.” There are urgent research needs for such patients, but accepting the dynamism inherent in such a clinical course has implications for contemporary clinical care.
This is based on a manuscript first published by Iwashyna TJ and Viglianti EM. Patient and population-level approaches to persistent critical illness and prolonged intensive care unit stays. Crit Care Clin. 2018;34(4):493–500. ► https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccc.2018.06.001. PubMed PMID: 30223989; PMCID: PMC6146412.
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Funding/Support
This work was supported by grants T32 HL007749 from the NIH and IIR 13-079 from the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research & Development service.
Disclosures
This work does not represent the official views of the US Government or Department of Veterans Affairs. The authors have nothing to disclose.
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Iwashyna, T.J., Viglianti, E.M. (2020). The Differential Diagnosis of Persistent Critical Illness and Other Causes of Prolonged ICU Stays. In: Preiser, JC., Herridge, M., Azoulay, E. (eds) Post-Intensive Care Syndrome. Lessons from the ICU. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24250-3_2
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