Why and
how do we need comprehensive international clinical epidemiology of ARDS?
By: Gianni
Tognoni, Luigi Vivona & Antonio
Pesenti
Intensive
Care Medicine Published: 03
July 2021
One of the most evident weaknesses of scientific and public
health strategies in the management of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
pandemic is certainly the scarcity of robust epidemiological data, not limited
to the quali-quantitative descriptions of patient populations and their
outcomes, specifically in the hardly comparable ICU settings of care, but aimed
at what has become the core and the vocation of a clinically oriented
epidemiological investigation. Clinical data collected and analysed with sound
methodological criteria are the essential source of information, closely
complementary to physio-pathological data for a better understanding of the
causes of the outcomes of critical and still uncertain clinical conditions.
The substantial absence of this type of epidemiology has
suggested a broader question: whether and how far the failure documented in
publications relating to the ICU phases of Covid-19 coincides with the state of
the art also for the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), closely
overlapping the severe pulmonary involvement seen in a small but dramatic
fraction of the Covid-19-infected population.
We felt that a targeted survey of the clinical
epidemiological literature could provide an overview of the methodological
strengths and weaknesses of recent research, and serve as an informed
suggestion as to most practicable strategies…
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