Multi-component Family Support Intervention for Critical Illness

"Critical illness is a common condition in the United States. People living with critical illness experience higher rates of chronic conditions, worse physical and mental health and higher mortality than those having serious illness by criteria usually used by the US Federal Government's health insurance programs. The prevalence of critical illness varies by population, insurance status, race and ethnicity and place of residence. People in poor and minority rural areas and those living in the southern US have higher rates of critical illness than those living in better-defined areas. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"Patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are hospitalized for conditions that are serious but not always life-threatening. ICUs can be viewed as a kind of intensive care unit, with patients receiving intensive care in order to prevent serious life-threatening complications.\n" - Anonymous Online Contributor

"We cannot prove that critical illness cannot be cured. These patients, who are too ill and who face many complications to respond to conventional therapy, should receive comprehensive assessment." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"Results from a recent clinical trial, a variety of common treatment methods were used with varying success to treat a variety of ICU patients. There were no conclusive results found to guide the most economical and best tolerated method to treat these ICU patients. Future research should focus on the effectiveness of alternative method therapies." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"The study found that critical illness is a multifactorial condition; the patients had multiple factors associated with increased risk (for developing critical illness), and their immune response was impaired. Although an immune response is generally required to clear infections, these results illustrate that patients with multiple risk factors can experience multifactorial critical illness and require heightened supervision." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"Signs of critical illness are present in 10 of every 100 critically ill patients and are more common in the intensive care unit. The more critically ill patients present with signs of increased work of breathing and other pulmonary manifestations. http://images.sushruti." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"There is significant overlap and association between diseases known to be associated with CICU admission for other reasons. The primary cause of CICU admission was not necessarily identified or known." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"Although not all of the studies reported statistically significant outcomes, the positive findings and the positive trends towards improvements may reflect improvements that would have occurred without the intervention. As with other psychosocial interventions, further controlled studies are required to better understand the effectiveness of a multi-component family support intervention for people affected by life-threatening chronic illnesses." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"There is very little new research in critical illness in the last decade and the management of this disease has been based on very limited evidence. There are several reasons: (i) the very low rate of ICU admissions and (ii) the limited time for high-quality research. These two limitations prevent any meaningful development in ICU medicine." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"Critical illness has an identifiable genetic pattern and risk factors that could influence patient care. Further studies of the genetic risk factors for critical illness are needed." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"To our knowledge, this is one of the first articles reporting on the age of patients hospitalized with ICU-acquired acute lung injury. We found a mean age of 61.1 yr, with a range from 40-69 yr. The study's limitations include a small sample size and the inability to distinguish between multiple demographic and pathological variables influencing the average age of ICU-acquired acute lung injury patients. Results from a recent paper highlight the need for epidemiologic investigations into potential risk factors and their relationship to age, to be considered for inclusion in standard clinical practice." - Anonymous Online Contributor

"There were few significant adverse events identified in our study. All serious adverse events were manageable without any adjustments to the treatment or hospitalization, and few were reported to the CCR by the intervention group. At the end of the study, significant improvements were observed in perceptions of coping in all three domains, social support/family system functioning and attitudes towards healthcare for people with advanced cancer, compared to baseline." - Anonymous Online Contributor