Chest
Clinical Investigations in Critical CareComparison of Five Bilevel Pressure Ventilators in Patients with Chronic Ventilatory Failure: A Physiologic Study
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
The investigative protocol was approved by the institutional ethics committee (S. Maugeri Foundation, Gussago, Italy) and was conducted according to the declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all the patients before their enrollment into the study.
Patients
Thirty-one patients were enrolled in the study. All but three patients (COPD, two patients; RCWD, one patient) completed the study and tolerated the experimental procedure well. Two of the patients who dropped out did not tolerate the mask, and the other one withdrew his consent. The individual characteristics of the 28 patients completing the study are shown in Table 1.
Breathing Pattern and V˙e
Figure 3shows a polygraphic tracing from a representative patient (patient 7) during the application of the studied
Discussion
This study shows that in stable, awake patients with CVF, all of the studied ventilators were tolerated quite well, although with a great intersubject variability in comfort. All ventilators performed well in terms of improvement in V˙e and inspiratory muscle unloading, thus fulfilling the aims of mechanical ventilation.25 IEs were similar among the studied ventilators. Among the ventilators, there was no significant difference in PTPao, min levels, whereas some ventilators differed in Pao,
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