Determinants of long-term mortality after critical illness: Forward. period

摘要

Understanding what influences the chances of living or dying following the receipt of critical care services is important. Period. That may be patently obvious to everyone, but each person's perspective on why it is important is almost certainly different. To mention just a few, it is important to patients and their families to have valuable discussions that produce well-informed decisions, it is important to critical care providers to determine the optimal therapies for a given patient, it is important to laboratory scientists and the pharmaceutical industry to guide the study of disease pathogenesis and new therapeutics, and it is important to policy makers for the potential impact on delivery of high-value healthcare and related resource consumption. As a field, critical care has devoted considerable effort to understanding the determinants of clinical outcomes during and immediately following care in an ICU (1). In fact, this is one area where critical care should not consider itself a laggard to other areas of medicine.