Severe neurologic impairment and uncommon magnetic resonance imaging findings after carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide poisoning is the most common cause of fatal poisoning worldwide and can lead to severe brain damages. We report a delayed encephalopathy after a severe carbon monoxide poisoning with uncommon magnetic resonance imaging findings.

Brief report: pulmonary auscultation in the operating room: a prospective randomized blinded trial comparing electronic and conventional stethoscopes.

BACKGROUND: We compared the subjective quality of pulmonary auscultation between 2 acoustic stethoscopes (Holtex Ideal® and Littmann Cardiology III®) and an electronic stethoscope (Littmann 3200®) in the operating room. METHODS: A prospective double-blind randomized study with an evaluation during mechanical ventilation was performed in 100 patients. After each examination, the listeners using a numeric scale (0-10) rated the quality of auscultation. Auscultation quality was compared in patients among stethoscopes with a multilevel mixed-effects linear regression with random intercept (operator effect), adjusted on significant factors in univariate analysis. A significant difference was defined as P < 0.05. RESULTS: One hundred comparative evaluations of pulmonary auscultation were performed. The quality of auscultation was rated 8.2 ± 1.6 for the electronic stethoscope, 7.4 ± 1.8 for the Littmann Cardiology III, and 4.6 ± 1.8 for the Holtex Ideal. Compared with Holtex Ideal, auscultation quality was significantly higher with other stethoscopes (P < 0.0001). Compared with Littmann Cardiology III, auscultation quality was significantly higher with Littmann 3200 electronic stethoscope (ß = 0.9 [95% confidence interval, 0.5-1.3]). CONCLUSIONS: An electronic stethoscope can provide a better quality of pulmonary auscultation than acoustic stethoscopes in the operating room, yet with a magnitude of improvement marginally higher than that provided with a high performance acoustic stethoscope. Whether this can translate into a clinically relevant benefit requires further studies.

[Wounded in action: the platinum ten minutes and the golden hour]. / Blessés au combat, dix minutes en platine, une heure en or.

In the battlefield, the majority of casualties die within ten minutes of the trauma. Most injuries result from an explosion and haemorrhage plays a central role. To improve survival rates, the French Army Health Service has developed a chain of survival from the battlefield to France based on prehospital combat casualty care, forward medical support during the first hour and damage control surgery.

Postoperative analgesia in elderly patients.

Elderly people represent the fastest-growing segment of our society and undergo surgery more frequently than other age groups. Effective postoperative analgesia is essential in these patients because inadequate pain control after surgery is associated with adverse outcomes in elderly patients. However, management of postoperative pain in older patients may be complicated by a number of factors, including a higher risk of age- and disease-related changes in physiology and disease-drug and drug-drug interactions. Physiological changes related to aging need to be carefully considered because aging is individualized and progressive. Assessment of pain management needs to include chronological age, biological age with regard to renal, liver and cardiac functions, and the individual profile of pathology and prescribed medications. In addition, ways in which pain should be assessed, particularly in patients with cognitive impairment, must be considered. Cognitively intact older patients can use most commonly used unidimensional pain scales such as the visual analogue scale (VAS), verbal rating scale (VRS), numeric rating scale (NRS) and facial pain scale (FPS). VRS and NRS are the most appropriate pain scales for the elderly. In older patients with mild to moderate cognitive impairment, the VRS is a better tool. For severe cognitively impaired older patients, behavioural scales validated in the postoperative context, such as Doloplus-2 or Algoplus, are appropriate. For postoperative pain treatment, most drugs (e.g. paracetamol, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, nefopam, tramadol, codeine, morphine, local anaesthetics), techniques (e.g. intravenous morphine titration, subcutaneous morphine, intravenous or epidural patient-controlled analgesia, intrathecal morphine, peripheral nerve block) and strategies (e.g. anticipated intraoperative analgesia or multimodal analgesia) used for acute pain management can be used in older patients. However, in view of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic changes in older persons, the higher incidence of co-morbidities and concurrent use of other drugs, each must be carefully adjusted to suit each patient. Evaluation of treatment efficacy and incidence and severity of adverse events should be monitored closely, and the concept of 'start low and go slow' should be adopted for most analgesic strategies.

Life-threatening rupture of a false aneurysm after femoral arterial catheterization: unexpected delay after a common procedure.

We report the case of a 79-year-old patient who presented with a femoral iatrogenic pseudoaneurysm of delayed and unusual onset with immediately life-threatening massive bleeding. Ultrasound is the method of choice for the diagnosis of pseudo aneurysm. If there is not spontaneous closure, ultrasound-guided compression repair, minimally invasive percutaneous treatments, and surgical repair are the three therapeutic options.