Latin American Surgical Outcomes Study in Paediatrics (LASOS-Peds): study protocol and statistical analysis plan for a multicentre international observational cohort study.

INTRODUCTION: Surgery is a cost-effective public health intervention. Access to safe surgery is a basic human right. However, there are still significant disparities in the access to and safety of surgical and anaesthesia care between low-income and middle-income countries and high-income countries. The Latin American Surgical Outcomes Study in Paediatrics (LASOS-Peds) is an international, observational, 14-day cohort study to investigate the incidence of 30-day in-hospital complications following elective or emergency paediatric surgery in Latin American countries. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: LASOS-Peds is a prospective, international, multicentre observational study of paediatric patients undergoing both elective and non-elective surgeries and procedures, inpatient and outpatient, including those performed outside the operating room. The primary outcome is the incidence of in-hospital postoperative complications up to 30 days after surgery. Secondary outcomes include intraoperative complications and the need for intensive care unit admission. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study received approval from the Institutional Review Board of the coordinating centre (Hospital das Clínicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo) as well as from all the participating centres. The study results are expected to be published in peer-reviewed journals and disseminated at international conferences. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT05934682.

Association between cuffed tracheal tube use and reduced ventilator-associated pneumonia and conditions after elective cardiac surgery in infants and young children.

BACKGROUND: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is a serious complication in children after cardiac surgery that may result from micro-aspiration. However, the current recommendation to use cuffed tracheal tubes (TTs) versus uncuffed TTs in children is still uncertain. Our main aim was to evaluate the incidence of VAP, ventilator-associated tracheobronchitis (VAT) and ventilator-associated conditions (VAC) in children up to five years old who underwent elective cardiac surgery. METHODS: Single-center, prospective before-and-after study at a tertiary pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) in Italy. 242 patients (121 in each group) through the following periods: phase I (from Jan 2017 to 20th Feb 2018), during which children were intubated with uncuffed TTs; phase II (from 21th Feb 2018 to Feb 2019), during which children were intubated with cuffed TTs. RESULTS: Data were collected using an electronic dedicated database. Median age was five months. The use of cuffed tubes reduced the risk of VAC and VAP respectively 15.8 times (95% CI 3.4-73.1, P=0.0008) and 14.8 times (95% CI 3.1-71.5, P=0.002). No major related airway complications were observed in the cuffed TTs group. Average treatment effect, calculated after propensity score matching, confirmed the significant effect of cuffed TTs on VAC and VAP. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests a marked reduction of VAP and VAC associated with use of a cuffed versus uncuffed TT in infants and children ≤5 years of age after elective cardiac surgery. A randomized clinical trial is needed to confirm these results and define the impact of use of a cuffed versus uncuffed TT across other relevant ICU outcomes and non-cardiac PICU patients.

Severe postintubation tracheobronchial rupture.

Tracheal injury is a rare complication after pediatric intubation. The choice of treatment depends on the size of the lesion and on the underlying disease. We present a complex case of severe tracheal injury treated with success with tracheal stent positioning.

Essential equivalence of the general equation for the nonequilibrium reversible-irreversible coupling (GENERIC) and steepest-entropy-ascent models of dissipation for nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

By reformulating the steepest-entropy-ascent (SEA) dynamical model for nonequilibrium thermodynamics in the mathematical language of differential geometry, we compare it with the primitive formulation of the general equation for the nonequilibrium reversible-irreversible coupling (GENERIC) model and discuss the main technical differences of the two approaches. In both dynamical models the description of dissipation is of the "entropy-gradient" type. SEA focuses only on the dissipative, i.e., entropy generating, component of the time evolution, chooses a sub-Riemannian metric tensor as dissipative structure, and uses the local entropy density field as potential. GENERIC emphasizes the coupling between the dissipative and nondissipative components of the time evolution, chooses two compatible degenerate structures (Poisson and degenerate co-Riemannian), and uses the global energy and entropy functionals as potentials. As an illustration, we rewrite the known GENERIC formulation of the Boltzmann equation in terms of the square root of the distribution function adopted by the SEA formulation. We then provide a formal proof that in more general frameworks, whenever all degeneracies in the GENERIC framework are related to conservation laws, the SEA and GENERIC models of the dissipative component of the dynamics are essentially interchangeable, provided of course they assume the same kinematics. As part of the discussion, we note that equipping the dissipative structure of GENERIC with the Leibniz identity makes it automatically SEA on metric leaves.