The January 2024 Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (PCCM) issue covers a wide variety of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) topics to ring in the new year.
This month’s issue features an article examining outcomes after in-hospital cardiac arrest from the ICU-RESUScitation dataset, a second article analyzing the use of the prostacyclin analogue epoprostenol as an anticoagulant in continuous renal replacement therapy in children with liver disease, and a third reviewing tools for predicting fluid responsiveness in pediatric shock. There are many clinical investigations in this issue covering topics such as variability in asthma treatment, perfusion index variations in septic shock, delays in vital signs appearing in the electronic health record, comparing viral DNA detection by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction in upper respiratory tract infections with metagenomic RNA sequencing in lower respiratory tract infections, a review of pediatric death after withdrawal of life-sustaining measures, and a survey of PICU clinician perspectives about respiratory cultures in ventilator-associated infections. A systematic review and meta-analysis discusses dexmedetomidine withdrawal in children—an important topic with increasing dexmedetomidine use. Additionally, there is an online laboratory investigation and a few online brief reports.