Deborah J. Cook

TL;DR: The presence of frailty among patients receiving mechanical ventilation is associated with increased odds of hospital mortality, discharge to long-term care, extubation failure, and need for tracheostomy.

TL;DR: Assessment of the etiology of cardiac troponin elevation among patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) and whether etiology affects mortality and length of stay found patients with elevated Troponin had worse outcomes compared with patients without trop onin elevation, and tropon in elevation not due to MI was predictive of increased hospital mortality.

TL;DR: In critically ill patients, neither tests of hypercoagulability nor D-dimer levels predict patients at risk of DVT and thus they should not be used to guide diagnostic testing for DVT.

TL;DR: Some of the major challenges and possible solutions to help a potential investigator through the myriad of difficulties in initiating an RCT in a complex environment are described.

TL;DR: BAL and PBC, combined with the use of quantitative cultures, appear to increase accuracy in diagnosing pneumonia, and the generalizability of these findings is limited by the fact that there are so few methodologically sound studies from so few centers.