According to the largest study to date of mortality trends in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), advances in critical care medicine played a major role in reducing the rate of mortality over a sixteen year period. The study has been published in the journal CHEST and will be presented at Chest 2014, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Researchers from Rutgers Wood Johnson Medical School, Staten Island University Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Government Medical College gathered data from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database. This database is one of the largest in the US and encompasses data from nearly eight million hospital stays a year. The research team identified over 174,000 patients with ARDS.
According to the findings of the study, the mortality rate decreased significantly, from 46.8 percent in 1996 to 32.2 percent in 2011. This translates into a reduction of 14.6 percent. From 2000 to 2005, there was an absolute reduction of 8.9 percent in mortality rates. A primary cause of this reduction was the availability of advanced critical care medicine.
According to Jared Radbel, MD, “While we cannot prove causation for the decreased mortality, we believe that collaborative advances in critical care medicine contributed to the overall decline. We assert that the sudden and sharp decrease in mortality from 2000-2005 can be attributed to the practice of low tidal volume ventilation.”
CHEST, publisher of the journal CHEST and a global leader in advancing best patient outcomes continues to work toward imparting innovative chest medicine education, clinical research and team-based care. The core mission of CHEST is to prevent, diagnose and treat chest diseases through education, communication and research. It provides critical knowledge and resources to its 18,700 members worldwide.
Source: CHEST – American College of Chest Physicians
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
