Tocilizumab for Severe Worsening COVID-19 Pneumonia: a Propensity Score Analysis.

Background: High levels of serum interleukin-6 (IL-6) correlate with disease severity in COVID-19. We hypothesized that tocilizumab (a recombinant humanized anti-IL-6 receptor) could improve outcomes in selected patients with severe worsening COVID-19 pneumonia and high inflammatory parameters.

Methods: The TOCICOVID study included a prospective cohort of patients aged 16-80 years with severe (requiring > 6 L/min of oxygen therapy to obtain Sp02 > 94%) rapidly deteriorating (increase by ≥ 3 L/min of oxygen flow within the previous 12 h) COVID-19 pneumonia with ≥ 5 days of symptoms and C-reactive protein levels > 40 mg/L.

Central venous oxygen saturation is not predictive of early complications in cancer patients presenting to the emergency department.

Central venous oxygen saturation (ScvO) is easily observable in oncology patients with long-term central venous catheters (CVC), and has been studied as a prognostic factor in patients with sepsis. We sought to investigate the association between ScvO and early complications in cancer patients presenting to the ED. We prospectively enrolled adult cancer patients with pre-existing CVC who presented to the ED.

Monitoring Personalized Learning Curves for Emergency Ultrasound With Risk-adjusted Learning-curve Cumulative Summation Method.

Background: Ultrasound (US) has been a regular practice in emergency departments for several decades. Thus, train our students to US is of prime interest. Because US image acquisition ability can be very different from a patient to another (depending on image quality), it seems relevant to adapt US learning curves (LCs) to patient image quality using tools based on cumulative summation (CUSUM) as the risk-adjusted LC CUSUM (RLC).