“Today, patients are admitted to intensive care units with a series of very different diagnoses: trauma, infections, cardiac events. Therefore, talking about a uniform prognosis is not possible. In general, over the last 30 years there has been a truly significant reduction in mortality for many conditions, and this is an extremely positive fact that we owe to technological advancement and the improvement of the training of doctors and nurses. However, after hospitalization in some patients we found an increase in muscle weakness, cognitive deficits and mental disorders.” This was stated to Adnkronos Salute by Nicola Latronico, head of the Resuscitation and Intensive Care Area of the Italian Society of Anaesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care on the occasion of the 77th Siaarti National Congress underway in Rome at the La Nuvola Congress Center in Eur.
“The fact is that many of the people who survive have some outcomes – underlines Latronico – And these outcomes are, today, configured in the ‘Syndrome after Intensive Care’, a multidimensional condition that affects patients in their physical, mental and cognitive aspects. And this is a serious problem.” A concrete example “is given to us by a study published a few years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine – the expert remarks – which showed how, after a year, people who were previously free develop a cognitive disorder comparable to that of a patient with mild Alzheimer’s after surviving the critical illness.” Therefore, “the new future that is advancing in the field of intensive care will ask experts to also take responsibility for those who survive, which means taking care of their suffering also from a scientific point of view in order to then find concrete solutions for these patients ”.
The Syndrome after Intensive Care “concerns all categories of patients but the outcomes represent, in some way, the sum of a series of events: first of all, how you arrive in Intensive Care (age and physical condition); where the patient lives (whether he can rely on an organized healthcare system or not). In general, therefore, frail elderly people are the people most exposed to the risk of disability, but young people are not spared,” she concludes.
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