Long term prognosis of patients with acute Renal Failure: Is intensive care worth it?

Excerpt

One of the changing paradigms of modern intensive care medicine is a redirection of the major aims of intensive care therapy from a short-term to a long-term perspective: It is not only important whether the patient survives an ICU stay but what long-term prognosis, what quality of life, what functional recovery the patient has. Nevertheless, very little is known about the long-term outcome of ICU patients in general and patients with different diseases. Thus it is very welcome that an increasing number of studies are not only evaluating hospital related outcome end-points, such as ICU/hospital length of stay and survival rate, but focus on long-term prognosis and quality of life after the ICU admission (for review see [1]). …