Management of Mechanical Ventilation in Decompensated Heart Failure.

Mechanical ventilation (MV) is a life-saving intervention for respiratory failure, including decompensated congestive heart failure. MV can reduce ventricular preload and afterload, decrease extra-vascular lung water, and decrease the work of breathing in heart failure. The advantages of positive pressure ventilation must be balanced with potential harm from MV: volutrauma, hyperoxia-induced injury, and difficulty assessing readiness for liberation.

Heterogeneous kinetics and pharmacology of synaptic inhibition in the chick auditory brainstem.

Identification of shared features between avian and mammalian auditory brainstem circuits has provided much insight into the mechanisms underlying early auditory processing. However, previous studies have highlighted an apparent difference in inhibitory systems; synaptic inhibition is thought to be slow and GABAergic in birds but to have fast kinetics and be predominantly glycinergic in mammals. Using patch-clamp recordings in chick brainstem slices, we found that this distinction is not exclusively true.