Publications by authors named "Carl Hinrichs"
Article Synopsis
- Hypernatremia is a common and serious condition in ICU patients, linked to higher mortality and longer stays, prompting this study to compare sodium chloride 0.9% and glucose 5% solutions as intravenous drug diluents.
- The study analyzed 265 adult COVID-19 patients, observing sodium levels and severe hypernatremia over the first 8 days after ICU admission, finding that glucose 5% led to lower sodium levels and reduced occurrences of severe hypernatremia.
- The results suggest that switching to glucose 5% as the standard diluent can help prevent hypernatremia in ICU patients, indicating a potentially simple change in treatment protocols.
Article Synopsis
- Intragastric botulinum neurotoxin injections (IBNI) are being used as a weight-loss treatment, but an outbreak of severe iatrogenic botulism occurred in early 2023 in Europe after patients received this treatment in Turkey.
- A retrospective analysis was conducted on ten patients in Austria and Germany who experienced severe symptoms like double vision, swallowing difficulties, and paralysis after IBNI.
- Despite the severity of their conditions, all patients were hospitalized, many in intensive care, and ultimately recovered without lasting health issues, underscoring the need for awareness and risk mitigation in medical procedures involving botulinum neurotoxins.
Background: In response to the high patient admission rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, provisional intensive care units (ICUs) were set up, equipped with temporary monitoring and alarm systems. We sought to find out whether the provisional ICU setting led to a higher alarm burden and more staff with alarm fatigue.
Objective: We aimed to compare alarm situations between provisional COVID-19 ICUs and non-COVID-19 ICUs during the second COVID-19 wave in Berlin, Germany.
Article Synopsis
- Selective water uptake by brain cells and brain tissue swelling after cardiac arrest contribute to hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, with CT scans used to evaluate this condition over time.
- This study included head CT scans from 115 cardiac arrest patients to analyze regional net water uptake (NWU) and its relationship with neurological outcomes.
- Results showed that a significant NWU (>8%) in certain brain regions was linked to poor neurological outcomes, suggesting that NWU could be a valuable biomarker for patient prognosis after cardiac arrest.
Intensive care units (ICU) are often overflooded with alarms from monitoring devices which constitutes a hazard to both staff and patients. To date, the suggested solutions to excessive monitoring alarms have remained on a research level. We aimed to identify patient characteristics that affect the ICU alarm rate with the goal of proposing a straightforward solution that can easily be implemented in ICUs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Candida auris a frequently multidrug-resistant yeast species that poses a global health threat due to its high potential for hospital outbreaks. While C. auris has become endemic in parts of Asia and Africa, transmissions have so far rarely been reported in Western Europe except for Great Britain and Spain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere exists a major concern regarding toxic effects of immunosuppressive medication on the kidney graft during post-transplant care, with observed variation in individual susceptibility to adverse drug effects amongst patients. To date, there has been no possibility to identify susceptible patients prospectively. This study analyzes medical data which includes time series of measures of renal function and trough levels of immunosuppressive drug Tacrolimus, with the main aim of identifying patients susceptible to drug toxicity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Renal transplantation has dramatically improved the survival rate of hemodialysis patients. However, with a growing proportion of marginal organs and improved immunosuppression, it is necessary to verify that the established allocation system, mostly based on human leukocyte antigen matching, still meets today's needs. The authors turn to machine-learning techniques to predict, from donor-recipient data, the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) of the recipient 1 year after transplantation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIL-6 and IL-10 have previously been implicated in the pathogenesis of post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorders (PTLD) and, like peripheral lymphocyte populations, are markers of immune status that are amenable to study in vivo. Thus, we analyzed cytokine plasma levels as well as lymphocyte subsets in a longitudinal analysis of 38 adult transplant recipients undergoing treatment for PTLD. Pretherapeutically, we found significantly elevated IL-6 (13.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Polyomavirus BK virus (BKV) infection represents a serious complication leading to BKV-associated nephropathy (BKVAN) and subsequent kidney graft loss in up to 10% of transplant patients. Cellular immunity is known to play a crucial role in the control of BKV replication. However, the knowledge on the BKV-T-cell response is limited: only two (VP1 and large T antigen) of six known BKV proteins were evaluated for their antigenicity so far.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Postoperative sepsis is one of the main causes of death after major abdominal surgery; however, the immunologic factors contributing to the development of sepsis are not completely understood. In this study, we evaluated gene expression in patients who developed postoperative sepsis and in patients with an uncomplicated postoperative course.
Methods: We enrolled 220 patients in a retrospective matched-pair, case-control pilot study to investigate the perioperative expression of 23 inflammation-related genes regarding their properties for predicting postoperative sepsis.