Assessing Respiratory Variability During Mechanical Ventilation in Acute Lung Injury (ALI)

Brief summary

Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.

Healthy biological systems are characterized by a normal range of "variability" in organ function. For example, many studies of heart rate clearly document that loss of the normal level of intrinsic, beat-to-beat variability in heart rate is associated with poor prognosis and early death. Unlike the heart, little is known about patterns of respiratory variability in illness. What is known is that, like the heart, healthy subjects have a specific range of variability in breath- to-breath depth and timing. Additionally, in animal models, ventilator strategies that re-introduce normal variability to the breathing pattern significantly reduce ventilator-associated lung injury. Critically ill patients requiring mechanical ventilation offer an opportunity to observe and analyze respiratory patterns in a completely non-invasive manner. Current mechanical ventilators produce real-time output of respiratory tracings that can analyzed for variability. The investigators propose to non-invasively record these tracings from patients ventilated in the intensive care units for mathematical variability analysis. The purpose of these pilot analyses are to: (1) demonstrate the range of respiratory variability present in the mechanically ve ventilated critically ill and (2) demonstrate the ventilator modality that delivers or permits the closest approximation to previously described beneficial or normal levels of variability. Future studies will use this pilot data in order to determine if the observed patterns of respiratory variability in mechanically ventilated critically ill subjects have prognostic or therapeutic implications.

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Last update posted Mar 29, 2016 · Synced Sep 6, 2026

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